Time Spent Viewing Captions on Television Programs

This 1999 paper by Carl Jensema, Ramalinga Sarma Danturthi, and Robert Burch reports on the eye movements of 23 deaf subjects, ages 14 to 61, while they watched captioned television programs. It discloses that the viewers in the study spent about 84 percent (%) of their television viewing time looking at the program's captions, at the video picture 14% of the time, and off the video 2% of the time. ("Off video" was due to eye blinks and normal eye movement.) Concludes that much exposure to print was "bound to influence reading skills." (Note: The DCMP educational and training materials are selected in large part because of their pictorial component, and thus it is imperative that the presentation rate of captions not prohibit opportunity to learn from this component.)

Tags: research, captioning