Preferences of deaf or hard of hearing users for live-tv caption appearance

Abstract

There is a wide range of visual appearance of captions during television programming (e.g. text color, typeface, caption background, number of lines, caption placement), especially during live or near-live broadcasts in local markets. The effect of these visual properties of captions on Deaf and Hard of Hearing (DHH) users’ TV-watching experience have been less explored in existing research-based guidelines nor in the design of state-of-the-art caption evaluation metrics. Therefore, we empirically investigated what visual attributes of captions are preferred by DHH viewers while watching captioned live TV programs. We convened two focus groups where participants watched videos consisting of captions with various display properties and provided subjective open-ended feedback. By analyzing the focus-group responses, we observed DHH users’ preference for specific contrast between caption text and background color such as, black text on white background or vice-versa, and caption placement not occluding onscreen salient content. Our findings also revealed for preferences genre-adaptive caption typeface and movement during captioned live TV programming.