SEO blog introduction
What Makes TV Captions Accurate?
Brief: An introduction for a captioning company's blog. Target phrase: TV caption quality standards. Draws on my captioning work. Spec sample for a fictional brand, not client work.
What makes TV captions accurate?
You have probably seen it on a live broadcast: a forecaster says “whether” and the caption reads “weather.” One wrong word can change a sentence, and for viewers who are deaf or hard of hearing, the caption is the program.
That is why the FCC sets caption quality standards for television. They come down to four things: accuracy, so the captions match what is said; synchronicity, so they appear with the speech; program completeness, so captions run from the first moment to the last; and placement, so they never cover important on-screen information.
Below, we walk through each standard with examples of what good captioning looks like and the mistakes that most often break it.
Meta description: Learn the four FCC TV caption quality standards (accuracy, synchronicity, completeness and placement) and how to check that your captions meet them.