Closed Captioning: Watching Movies and Series When It's Turned on Has Benefits

If you the type who always turns on the subtitles whenever you're watching movies and series, what you're doing is similar to what's described as closed captioning and you are not alone in this practice.

In 2020, the Office of Communications of the United Kingdom released the results in 2016 entitled, "Television access services: Review of the Code and guidance" stating that 18 percent of the population is regularly using closed captioning although just 20 percent of those viewers were found to be hard of hearing.

According to Salon information site, home captioning has been existing since roughly for almost five decades now and the first show to use it was The French Chef by Julia Child in the early 1970s.

In the past, the service was accepted only of interest to non-hearing audiences who need a special device to access it.

ALSO READ: WHO Issues New Guideline on Screen Time Restrictions for Children

Closed Captioning Technology

Initially, captioning technology was built into television sets, and the past 10 years have brought more fine-tuning of accessibility necessities to streaming services. The said information site said that it did not take long for more extensive applications to captioning to become apparent.

United Kingdom doctor, Dr. Richard Purcell, who's also one of the founders of Caption.Ed, a captioning company said that he's seeing his company as a service for people whether they have a hearing impairment or not to enhance their interactions with media.

As Purcell explained, "there is a wealth of evidence demonstrating that" for a broad range of participants, captions can enhance the comprehension and retention of information of a viewer.

There is evidence as well, to suggest that captions can enhance the ability of a viewer to draw inferences, not to mention define words, determining emotions from media sources.

Not surprisingly then, turning the captions on and incorporating text with speech can assist audience who are learning new languages.

In a similar way, it can be helpful for children and adults to promote skills in reading, making it an essential tool to meet the present instance.

Closed Captioning Vs Subtitles

According to Matinee Multilingual, there is a difference between closed captions or CCs and subtitles. Though they may look similar, they are designed for two different uses and purposes.

Subtitles provide a text substitute for a video footage's dialogue, the characters, narrators, and other vocal participants' spoken words.

On the other hand, closed captions not just supplement for dialogue, but other significant parts of the soundtrack as well, describing background noises, ringing of phones, and other audio hints that need to be described.

Fundamentally, subtitles assume a viewer can hear the audio, although they need the dialogue provided in text form, too.

Closed captioning, on the other hand, assumes a viewer cannot hear the audio and would need a text description of what they would be hearing.

Closed Captioning Benefits

Cognitive psychologist Dr. Stephen Christman, also a psychology professor at the University of Toledo admitted to some superficial pleasures of closed captioning.

He said, when watching sports events, he sometimes turns the close captioning on in order for him to listen to music while he follows the action.

The psychologist noted too, the potential of captioning for learning languages, and other cognitive benefits. He explained one can read faster than he can speak.

With closed captioning on, the audience can rapidly read the current dialogue and turn their concentration back to the visual action and apply their knowledge of what is being said and what has yet to be said, to improve their appreciation of both visual and nonverbal aspects of what is going on onscreen.

Related information on about the difference between closed captioning and subtitles is shown on The Creative Toolkit for Marketer's YoutTube video below: