Fact · Accessibility and health
216participants
In a 2026 online survey of 216 validated deaf and hard of hearing participants, live TV captions and automatic captions synchronized with the audio were rated similarly.
Checked against its source on October 16, 2026
In the source's own words
“Results show that TV and ASR captions were rated similarly.”
Are Caption Metrics Broken? Latency, Deaf and Hard of Hearing User Ratings, and Bias across Technologies, Bernard Thompson et al., arXiv (preprint), accepted for ACM ASSETS 2026, 2026, Abstract.
Open the original- What it measures
- Participants viewed 70 clips recorded from live TV and rated caption quality and how well they understood the content. The study compared captions as originally broadcast, captions synchronized with audio, and automatic captions with and without a delay.
- What it does not show
- The ratings come from live TV clips. The study does not say that automatic captions are accurate in conversation, in noisy rooms or on phone calls.