TV Subtitles Are Used Most Often By Adults Age 18-29 — What Are Your 'Must-Read' Shows?
Young adults — not Gen Xers or Boomers — are more likely to regularly turn on closed captioning when watching a TV program, a new survey reveals.
In a recent YouGov survey of 1,000 U.S. adults (charted below), more than 50% of the respondents age 18-29 said they use closed captioning "always" or "most of the time" even when watching a show presented in a language they know.
For the next oldest, age 30-44 demo, 35% use closed captioning always/most of the time, while the percentages for the 45-64 and 65+ respondents are even smaller.
Closed captioning for television was first put into use in 1980, to describe to the deaf and hard of hearing all spoken content and significant music/sound effects. Since 2011, the FCC has required all providers of programs to caption material which has audio in English or Spanish, with some exceptions.
TVLine raised the issue of an increasing reliance on closed captioning more than four-and-a-half years ago, in an op-ed titled "Dear TV: I Have a Closed Caption Habit (And Apparently Many Others Do, Too)." In the poll we ran back then, 46% of respondents said they "always" have CC on, with another 28% saying "very often." Only 6% said they "never" use closed captioning.
When it comes to the WHY, 26% of TVLine respondents blamed "mumbling actors," 25% said "to catch details amid fast-paced dialogue," and 18% complained that "music drowns out dialogue." And how! (Five percent said they utilize the feature because they have a diagnosed hearing deficit.)
Seemingly independent of the YouGov survey results cited above, the New York Times this week took a look at the wider-spread use of closed captioning and consulted an array of experts to diagnose the cause of this trend. The usual suspects surfaced:
➡ The design of ever-thinner TVs has forced the tiny, tinny speakers to face away from the viewer
➡ Feature film content that had its sound elaborately mixed to sound damn great in a theater suffers from being compressed to squeeze out of your laptop's itty-bitty speaker
➡ Baseline volume levels wildly vary from streamer to streamer
As TVLine suggested years ago, a supplemental sound bar can help, while the Times' tech editor notes that Prime Video has a "dialogue boost" option that offers greater clarity with spoken words (but cannot make up for an actor's poor enunciation).
All I know is that I would have understood mayyyyybe 25% of Apple TV+'s Accents From All Over the World-heavy Hijack were it not for closed captioning, which alas is not always available with press screeners!
What does your closed captioning habit look like these days? Is there a program for which you just know you will always need them? Name names, and vote in our new poll below.