Do you prefer ALL CAPS or Mixed Case captions?

Black and white title All Caps vs Mixed Case

All caps captions are those that utilize all capital letters. THEY LOOK LIKE THIS. For many years, all caps captions were industry standard. Mixed case, or sentence case, captions capitalize only the first letter of each sentence as well as proper nouns. This is the standard case used for most written text in the English language.

First, a little history:

When closed captioning was introduced more than forty years ago, it required the use of a caption decoder box attached to the television in order to receive the captions. These first caption decoder boxes could not accommodate descenders (the part of the letter that falls below the base line) like g, j, p, q, and y. Thanks to advances in technology, this is no longer an issue. Captions may now be either all caps or mixed case. For Real-Time captioners, however, there is a bit more work that goes into producing mixed case captions. The live captioner must pause and account for appropriate capitalization. For example, the word “may'' is not typically capitalized, unless the subject is the month of May. That said, it is this attention to detail that makes all the difference in terms of the quality of the viewer’s experience.

 
 
 

ALL CAPS

  • SLIGHTLY INCREASED CAPTION SPEED FOR LIVE CAPTIONS DUE TO CAPTIONER SOFTWARE LIMITATIONS/FUNCTIONALITY

  • EASIER FOR PEOPLE WITH LOW-VISION TO SEE AND READ

  • MAY BE MISINTERPRETED AS SHOUTING OR OVEREMPHATIC

Mixed Case

  • Easier for people with dyslexia and other disabilities to read

  • Aligns with other written text styles

  • Slightly more difficult for captioners in live situations due to accounting for proper nouns, etc.

 

The push for mixed case captions

Many people have come to view all caps as a form of SHOUTING and find it difficult to read large chunks of all caps text. Since the primary purpose of closed captions is to provide accessibility for all, it is important that the captions be readable and easily understood by the majority of viewers. That said, viewer preference does play an important role as well. In fact, many streaming platforms allow the user to choose the caption styles, though this might also depend on the device type as well (television, tablet, phone, etc.) 

Due to increased demand for mixed case captions, in August 2022 the National Captioning Institute switched default lettering from all caps to mixed case for all pre-recorded programming that requires offline captioning. That said, some clients still prefer to use all caps, so NCI continues to caption per client requests. There are many reasons that certain programs might still be captioned in all caps. The number one reason is consistency - if a program has numerous seasons captioned in all caps, the client may prefer to continue that way so that all seasons are formatted the same.

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Lorri Hatfield