Human Visual and Auditory Information. Subjective Evaluation of Methods for Presenting Closed-Captions on TV News Programs for Hearing-Impaired People.

Several methods for presenting closed-captions (captions) on TV news programs for hearing-impaired people were subjectively evaluated. A total of 180 captioned programs were used for the experiment ; produced by combining 36 presentation methods and 5 kinds of TV news materials. The evaluations were had done by 35 hearing-impaired people and 36 people with normal hearing. Three factors were evaluated : overall goodness, caption quality and picture quality. They were evaluated on a scale of 1 to 5. Two-line captions that changed at once were evaluated to be the best. Separating the caption area from the picture area was found to improve the score. Captions were easier to understand when the display time of the captions was lengthened.