[games_access] Closed Caption Format

Reid Kimball reid at rbkdesign.com
Sun Apr 27 18:24:12 EDT 2008


Honestly, I'm not sure about cultural expectations. I have attached a
.pdf that is a guideline for captioning for TV. It has a lot more
information than you'll ever want to know but on page 25 begins
examples of how to caption sound effects.

For your Squirrel <Chitter>, you would caption it like this:

[Squirrel Chitter]

If you wanted to use Onomatopoeia:

[Squirrel Chitter]
chit-chit-chit

but that could be easily mistaken for "shit" and I'm not sure how else
to capture the chitter sound of a squirrel in words.

For Dialog, on page 28, it recommends putting the speakers name in parenthesis,

(Detective)
Where were you on the night of the twenty-third?

(Mr. Pernicious)
[gasp]
Why, that is a personal matter, Detective!

Hope that helps! Great to see you are implementing CC, thank you for that.

In the past I have said that all sounds should be closed captioned for
games so that deaf and hard of hearing players are on equal footing
with hearing players. Ideally, it would be great if that could happen
for every game and developer, but I realize sometimes it's not
possible to caption all sounds. The next best thing is to identify
only the crucial sounds that must be captioned so that players don't
become frustrated with a lack of information.

-Reid

On Sat, Apr 26, 2008 at 12:58 PM, John Bannick <jbannick at 7128.com> wrote:
> Reid,
>
>  What visual clues do I use to indicate sounds in CC?
>  Right now I'm using brackets.
>
>  For example, a kids game I'm currently coding says the name of an animal,
> then plays its sound.
>  I want to distinguish the sound from the name.
>  So I'm currently sending our CC display the string:
>
>  Squirrel <Chitter>
>
>  Similarly, a story game I'm working on has dialog and incidental sounds.
>  I'm currently sending our CC display strings like:
>
>  Detective: Where were you on the night of the twenty-third? Mr. Pernicious:
> <gasp> Why, that is a personal matter, Detective!
>
>  I suspect that there is no universal standard.
>  However, you would know if there are general user expectations on this.
>  And if they are specific by culture: American, British, etc.
>
>  Thanks,
>
>  John Bannick
>  7-128 Software
>
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>  games_access at igda.org
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