Meryl Evans: Captions, Clean, Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious | Turn the Lens Ep35

Cold Open

Well I am so excited for this.
I am so excited Meryl.
Me too Jeff I'm excited too.
All right so we will go in 3, 2, 1.

Jeff Frick:
Hey welcome back everybody Jeff Frick here coming to you from the home studio for another episode of ‘Turn the Lens’. And I've been trying to get this guest on for a while, and maybe it's a little bit of a benefit that we waited so long because there's some new things happening. But, you know, I spend more time on Closed Caption. I don't know, more time. Probably one of the most tedious and painful processes that I spend a lot of effort on, because I think it really matters. And we're so excited to have this guest on. And she's going to tell us why it matters, how we can do a better job, and some of the crazy trends that are happening out there that we gotta watch out for. So joining us all the way from the Dallas Fort Worth area, she's Meryl Evans, she's the founder of Meryl.net. She's a speaker. She does training. She has a TED talk. And I think she likes to say she's your digital marketing left hand gal because she's a left handed person, not right handed person which I think is pretty fun. So Meryl welcome. Great to see you.

Meryl Evans:
Thank you Jeff, I'm excited to be here and to connect with you. We’ve known each other for so long, so I'm glad it happened when it happened. Things happen in good time.

Jeff Frick:
Exactly. There's always a reason. So before we jump into kind of best practices, and I have so many questions about how to caption and things I run into all the time, let's remind people why closed caption is great for people that you know, obviously can't hear. You said you were born with a ‘hearing free’ I think was your great expression. And some people are hard of hearing which you see annotated HOH but also sometimes you just miss things or, you know, even just like watching a movie, the sound goes high or low or this or that. I find myself watching stuff with closed caption all the time, and you presented a bunch of statistics on your page of the proliferation of people watching video with the sound turned off, which you could do if you got a closed caption track.

Meryl Evans:
Yeah, exactly. So I was born profoundly deaf, and I got my first caption decoder when I was about 13 years old. It's the way back then, before ADA which is the Americans with Disabilities Act. Which is anniversary 34th anniversary.

Jeff Frick:
I was gonna say, when did that pass? When does the ADA pass?

Meryl Evans:
1990. July 26, 1990.

Jeff Frick:
Okay.

Meryl Evans:
So I got my caption decoder before that happened. And you had to hook it up to your TV just like a VCR or DVD player and then you turned it on, and there was the caption. But back then, not many things were captioned. Took a while for it to catch on. I mean, I would just, I remember looking at their TV guide and looking for the caption symbol wherever to find something, and then when I went to get movies to watch, I was always looking for that symbol. Because it was like spotting a unicorn. They were hard to find back there. And now, wow, it’s exploded. People tell me all the time they use captions. I was in a show, ‘Mary Poppins’ last week and we captioned three shows and people were raving about it and none of these people were deaf. So they just got the most benefit out of it. It helped them fill in gaps they missed or maybe misunderstood an actor. So people just love captions and not just for the deaf and hard of hearing.

Jeff Frick:
Right. I'm curious how did you show captions during your show? And just for people that don't know, you like to participate in musicals, so you were in Mary Poppins for the last month or so, hopefully that went well, but how did you show closed captions in a live theater show?

Meryl Evans:
So, we have an awesome human being named Debbi Tank. She is involved with the theater. We have a deaf theater. We have something called ‘star catchers’ which are people with disabilities, mostly intellectual and developmental disabilities and autism. So they’ve always captioned those shows and when I heard about the process I was like, oh, my God, this sounds like a lot. And they do it free, so it is doable. You just have to have talented volunteers ready to step up. So the way they do it is they use PowerPoint and all the slides are black. So it just shows up on wherever it is as black. And so every slide has dialog or lyrics or whatever and they just push the arrow key to go to the next slide, next slide. And if somebody adlibs, they can adjust as necessary, go up or down whatever. So yeah, it’s all done by hand and it's not going to be 100% accurate. Because if there’s adlibbing, we can't change it. But that's okay because it's based on the script we worked off of. So you’re getting the story as somebody who attends musical theater. I'm getting a story. I know what it's about, so, and I know it's not going to be perfect because when you use regular human caption by typing, there’s always a delay. With these, there is no delay. So that’s where it has the upper hand. And we got a big TV screen. We put it off to the side in front of the stage so the actors couldn’t use it. And it was just for the audience. Yeah, because sometimes the kids are tempted to look at it, so.

Jeff Frick:
Right

Meryl Evans:
But it turned out great and it was just marvelous.

Jeff Frick:
That's awesome. So before we jump into some of the details, and that's one of them, is the difficulty in live captioning, just a few more stats about, you know, the benefits and you know, the use case I always tell people when they don't understand. And I’m like if you're standing in line at the grocery store waiting and you want to catch up on things, you don't want to be a jerk and have your sound up. So I think it goes to this other thing which you've talked about, which is communicating in multiple fashions concurrently. And I think I broke it down on my post on LinkedIn. I have, you know, there's obviously the audio, there's the captions, you can see the people, there's quotes, there's hashtags, you know, there's all these different things. And I think to your point, everyone is going to receive that differently. Some people might like, one mode of learning over another or maybe they like auditory or maybe they like the text. And I think it's a really important concept to think of, of your consumers. And how can you appeal to as many ways that they absorb information and learn concurrently as possible? And I think that's really the bigger theme here and closed captions is a really important piece of that.

Meryl Evans:
For sure. So one of our posted videos on LinkedIn, I always talk about what’s in the video, a lot of people like to do teasers in their post. And you basically have to watch the video to know what it’s about. The post won’t tell you and that's not a good thing, because you're depriving people who don't want to watch the video, of the content. So when you do both the post and the video, you're giving people options in how they consume your content. Sometimes I see a five minute video, I'm like, I don't have time for five minutes, but I can scan the post, that kind of thing. Or if they don’t have captions, I can scan the post and not feel angry as I would if they didn't have anything at all.

Jeff Frick:
Right.

Meryl Evans:
It's a compromise for people who don't know how to do captions yet. But captions are everywhere and there’s almost no reason not to do it because there’s so many ways you can do it now. So when you have a post with the text, you have the video and you have the caption, you are just reaching a much bigger audience than you were if you used one of those.

Jeff Frick:
Right. So just for clarity, so before ADA were captions not required on regular television?

Meryl Evans:
They are required on regular television. So that ADA applies to network TV. Actually it’s not the ADA, it’s the communication act CV... I’m always forgetting the acronym, [CVAA - Twenty-First Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act of 2010] but it's from the FCC [Federal Communications Commission] and they require anything that aired on regular network TV.

Jeff Frick:
Right.

Meryl Evans:
Or cable TV must be captioned. And that's why everything is captioned now.

Jeff Frick:
Right, right. It's really interesting. Okay, so let's jump into some of the rules because, like I say, I... I spend so much time trying to caption stuff and it takes me so long and there's... and I have a bunch of questions, but let's just jump into some of your rules. First things first, colors. You suggest actually, it's not even black. It's slightly off black and slightly off white, but just simple white on black. No yellow, no orange, no green, no purple, no yellow. So share a little bit about how we, you know, how do we see and you know, the impact of contrast and something simple like white on black or, you know, almost white on black versus when you start to use colors.

Meryl Evans:
For sure. I remember when I had the caption decoder, one day I saw colors. They were testing violet, they were testing yellow, and I was excited because it was a change. But it quickly became a nuisance. It just interrupted the viewing experience. Now, you’ll never make 100% of the viewers happy with your caption choices. Just stop that. That's what the captioning 10 guidelines are. So it’s the best practices to help you reach the biggest number of people possible when they cannot control the formatting of the captions. Nowadays you can go on YouTube, you can go on Netflix, you can go on Hulu and customize the caption. That is the number one way to format captions. It’s the user preference. The user, letting them decide how they want the caption. I know people, a small percentage who prefer yellow to white. Whereas those of us who don’t like it strongly dislike yellow. It’s just an uncomfortable color for some people.

Jeff Frick:
Right.

Meryl Evans:
Or if they have a disabilities that just makes it harder to tolerate.

Jeff Frick:
Right.

Meryl Evans:
And the reason I say off-black, off-white and off-black is just to take the edge off a little bit. Because sometimes the black black can be too much for some people, so it’s kind of a compromise. And it’s the strongest contrast between the text and the background. So that’s where you’ll have the most success if you have to be in control of the color.

Jeff Frick:
|kay. We're going to jump all over the place, because that then begs the question as to the difference between closed captions and open captions. And I think a lot of people mix those up. I certainly do, but I use the expression burned captions, you know, burning it into the MP4 so you can't change it. And I can choose exactly what it looks like versus closed captions, I guess, which is where you have the SRT file that then drives the YouTube or whatever the choice, the choice selector thing is. So how do you decide when to burn in your captions and when not to burn in your captions? Because, like you said, you’re probably going to piss off somebody with either choice.

Meryl Evans:
Well, closed captions are always the best option and here’s why. So, I have my phone. If I'm watching it this way, it’s going to be really small, the captions are going to be really small. But if I turn it sideways and it expands, the captions get bigger, with the screen. So that’s the advantage of closed captions, they are adjustable and you can adjust them. But with open or burned in captions, nothing changes. You're stuck with that color choice, with that style. Oh my goodness, it looks mod. Too bad. It doesn't matter how you even if you put it on a big screen, it’ll still be the same size as you burned it in.

Jeff Frick:
It won't scale with the video? It doesn't re-scale with the video as the different size.

Meryl Evans:
Right. Correct. It does not look, well. Think of the video like a picture. And you know how you can make a picture get bigger by. But it loses quality, it becomes grainy when you stretch a picture bigger than it actually is.

Jeff Frick:
Right. Right.

Meryl Evans:
So anyway, so closed caption is advantageous and it lets the viewer be in control. However, there are situations like if you're using Instagram, TikTok, mobile, basically mobile social networks, it's very hard to do a caption file and a caption video that way. When I upload my video to Instagram, I use Instagram captioning tool and I use the mode. You can actually make, a lot of people probably don't know this, but you can make it bigger and you can control the colors a little bit. And I can make them black and white and make them a little bigger. So in that case, it's open caption. Instagram does have a captioning option now but I don't use it because most of the people burn in their caption and it was overlapping the Instagram captions were overlapping the person’s video and I got tired of it and you can't turn it off. Yeah, I wish it would work like LinkedIn. If you go to LinkedIn, there’s the caption button right there on the video. So, if somebody has open caption, I can tap it and turn it off and not have both showing. But Instagram you have to go into your settings to turn it off and then back out. No, that’s too much. So, that’s the difference, you know, it depends on the circumstances. Sometimes people don't know what it means to have a second file to have that SRT. Or VTT file. They don't know what that means. So open caption could be easier for them. So the key is the caption in the first place so that's step number one. The rest you can make progress as you get more experience.

Jeff Frick:
Right. Okay. Well, let's stick on this topic because then the next thing is backgrounds versus putting like a, you know, on the outside edge of the letters. [Stroke] Or what I do even is just put a full black frame. So I'll often just take the whole video and scooch it up to give myself a nice black frame. So I've got a consistent place for those white letters to lay down. What I'll, what then I'll try to do is actually sync the SRT exactly to the burned in. So when the SRT ones pop up, they actually exactly lay over the top of the, of the I guess open would be the right, the right word to say it. I mean, is, is that a good best practice? Because we often times people just don't leave enough, you know, wiggle room down here. And even on some of your little demo videos, you know, the captions, especially if you have graphics and lower third and their name and this and that, you know, you just lose space. So I find like, scale it down and then create a frame and then put the caption. So it's got its own place. It's not bothered. There's no distraction behind it. And it's nice and clean and readable.

Meryl Evans:
Well like Instagram and TikTok have other overlay stuff. On their, you know, they have your user name, they have all the like buttons and you know, so I have to put it up higher than I normally would on regular video because otherwise it gets in fight with the overlay. So that one I have to move up and that’s another advantage of closed caption by the way. So if you, playing a video on YouTube and you're playing with the player, the caption moves up with the player so those that don't see the caption even when you move it and then when you move it away, it goes back to where it was. Oh, and get this. Did you know you can move the caption in Zoom and in YouTube and in other places?

Jeff Frick:
You can move it where?

Meryl Evans:
You can move them. Yeah, you can take the caption right now on Zoom and move it anywhere you want.

Jeff Frick:
Oh within your settings?

Meryl Evans:
No. Just drag and drop.

Jeff Frick:
Oh it’s a drag and drop.

Meryl Evans:
Yeah, just drag and drop. You can do that on YouTube too. So, you can always play with it and see if it works. It works in some places, not everywhere but that would be really nice if it was possible everywhere. But I can't tell you how many times I watched something on Hulu. Hulu is very strange. So for example, I’ll watch Law and Order SVU on NBC on my TV. The caption and the credit never overlap, so you could see all the starring names, actor's name and the caption, but on Hulu, they always overlap each other. And I'm constantly having to. Yeah, if I want to see their names. I have to pause, and yeah it’s a pain. So I don't know what’s going on with that, but it matters. We want to see both, please don't hide these things. But they are ways around it and that’s another advantage of open caption. You can control the placement of the credit and the caption to ensure they don't overlap because not everybody knows how to move captions. But really the best thing to do is just put the credits somewhere else and let the captions be where they are.

Jeff Frick
Right. Right. Okay so next. So next question. So I use Premiere a lot and so the question is, you know, kind of how long in terms of duration and number of words per text block. And I looked before we got on, the default on Adobe Premiere is 42 characters, three seconds and no gap in between each block. I think you said you like 32 to 36 characters, something like that. So two questions. You know, how many words should there be? Or what's the, is it, is it the duration? Is it where people take breaks or speaker breaks? You know, how do you figure out where to put the limits and the bounds of a particular block?

Meryl Evans:
Yeah, timing is tricky. I didn't know how to do it because I’ve worked in the caption to know how long something should be up and not up. It's like one second plus one quarter of a second per caption. In other words, no caption should be on for only one second, that’s too short. It needs to be slightly over one second on the short end. On the long end, I think it was six seconds. I never remember because I don't do numbers well, but for the most part it’s 32 characters per line, 64 for both lines together.

Jeff Frick:
Oh, 32 per line. Okay.

Meryl Evans:
Yeah, but to make things more complicated, it can depend on some variables. Because some networks, streaming networks, you know, they format a differentiating format, uses certain fonts that make it bigger or smaller. So you know, it’s a lot of things. So there’s no perfect number. Captioning Key, which is like the premier guide that everybody depends on, they say 32 but Netflix, I believe they’ll do 42 and then Amazon is 40 or 30, I don’t remember. So they're not consistent. But the key is you don't want it to go all the way across because that turns it into a reading experience. Captions are meant to be scanned, not read. In other words you should be able to scan it quickly. You can watch the video. But when you have it going all the way across, you’re just reading, there’s so much text, you’re reading and you're missing the video. So that's why length is important. And I had my workout had some caption up for a really long time, like ten, 15 seconds. And I was like, I stopped doing whatever the instructor said because I didn’t realize the timing was off because the caption went up too long. So It matters, yeah.

Jeff Frick:
So another question I had, which I think you just answered was if I have, let's just say I have eight words. Is it better to have eight words in a line or to stack at four words and four words? And my assumption that it's better to have it stacked, because then your eye doesn't have to move so much, and it's more of a blob in the middle versus an extended line. And it sounds like that is true. You want to keep it concentrated in the middle if you can, versus having a long line.

Meryl Evans:
Well, it depends, Ha!

Jeff Frick:
Of course.

Meryl Evans:
Everything is ‘It depends’ right or if it’s the word Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. Sorry, Mary Poppins in my head. It depends because, line breaking point or division, think Captioning Key calls it line division, a lot of us say breaking point. And that's the very end of the line. You want to go to the next line or the next caption, depending.

Jeff Frick:
Right.

Meryl Evans:
It makes a difference. So for example, if my name is at the end of line one. And my last name is at the beginning of line two, that’s not good. Names, first and last name should stay together in one line. So in other words, I moved my first name to the second line with my last name. So for little things like that and you don’t want to end the caption on something like the word ‘and'. It’s like, and ... what? So it affects the cognitive, it becomes a cognitive overload. Because you’re having to hold that thought waiting for the next one to pop in. Don't forget, conversation happens quickly so the brain’s got to process quickly. So line division helps ease that cognitive overload when you do things in the proper place. But that takes practice and understanding the guideline, even I sometimes I'm like, do my break here or break there? So, it's just a lot of practice. But it’s just something to be aware of and pay attention to, because people like me have depended on captions for many, many years. We notice these little things. People who enjoy captions not because they depend on them are less likely to catch these little things that make a difference.

Jeff Frick:
Right. No, I think I use page breaks a lot to be able to drive emphasis, and make sure that it ends where it where it wants and it picks up where I want it to. Because if I'm not using bold and I'm not using yellow or green, then that's a way that I can, I can and that's why I like it. I want to set it up to where the breaks are, where I want it. I don't want it to follow some some generic, some generic path.

Ok, so this is a big one. And I know your rule, but it just kills me, so I, I, I, I, I, I, I, stutter sometimes. Or I'll repeat myself, repeat myself, or I find a lot of people in, a lot of people in interviews will start a sentence and then maybe change their mind and then kind of stop and start a new sentence, which is a great place to put, a break on the caption. Your rules say that, you know, you want to read and see in the caption, all my I, I, I, I, I, I but the question is, you know, should it accurately reflect or should it be easier for you to consume? And I think I know your answer, but it seems a little counterintuitive if, if it doesn't really add that much value or, you know, there's four I’s and I can take it down to two you know it's a really soft, squishy, no easy answer problem. So how do you address things like that?

Meryl Evans:
Its a tricky one. It's very hard to have a black and white on that one. If it’s like a, if it’s like your video it’s a business video and somebody says ‘um’ and ‘ah’ a lot I will not include them because it does detract. From, you know, you're trying to focus and you’re seeing ums and ahs so much that you can’t make sense. I know somebody with Tourette’s, which is, they stutter, they say certain words over and over. They may, they may, anyway they, I love how they captioned it, they skip. I can't remember exactly how they did it, but it just made it easier to follow. I wish I could remember exactly what they did, but it was very clever. However, professional TV like news and networks and TV shows, they need to have it because usually there’s a reason for it. So if a character is stumbling, they’re obviously nervous, or it tells you something about their personality and how they’re responding to a situation. They’re nervous, they’re lying. You know, it can communicate a lot of things because we rely on text. Don't forget, we don't usually have sound cues. So we may not hear that nervousness in their voice, people like me don't. So those words give you a hint into that person’s personality or current situation or feelings. But when it comes to, you know, just your video, my videos, I leave it out. Sometimes I might, like, I’ll shape my words a little bit. I start to say something then I change. I caption as much as I can reflecting that and maybe put like ellipses like I’ll change my direction. It's one of those you just have to go on your best.

Jeff Frick:
Yeah. Well it's, it's funny when you, when you shift sentence it's a great place to put a page break because then suddenly that text doesn’t look so awkward if you put that page break and then the actual, the next caption is a nice sentence. And then what's funny? Thinking about professionals, you know, hopefully most of them don't have a lot of crutch words. You know, they've, they've worked it out of their system if they're doing professional broadcasting. So it is part of the character. It is part of the script. If they're, you know, doing something versus just regular people, and we all have our little crutch words and we, we stumble, we're just not that good. Okay. So that so that's good.

Okay, here's another, another one, which is quiet and sounds and different voices, and you've got a whole video dedicated to, you know, don't leave out the quiet. There's stuff going on there that you can communicate. So how do you think about communicating either silence, laughter? You know, different things that are not speech or silence, I guess, or music. I love music on the movies. It tells you you're supposed to be nervous, like ‘nervous music.’

Meryl Evans:
With sound, it depends. If you see somebody laughing, I mean there’s just no. They don't typically caption that sound, but if it’s coming at it from another room they’ll put it in brackets [laughter] you know and show that it’s coming from somewhere else. There’s lots of creative ways to deal with that. That's why I got frustrated with ‘Stranger Things.’ They caption every single sound on earth in the, in Season 4. It became the caption show. Some people disagree with me. Some deaf people disagree with me and that's okay. Like I said, you're never going to get 100% agreement on captions. But I felt like after every episode I was so tired because I was reading so much and missing the action on the screen, but they were captioning things that were so quick and not even important and that you could see happening. I remember this scene when one of the kids was hiding in a place, a trailer, and he was making himself like SpaghettiOs. He opened the can, cut that can open, slopped the food into a bowl and nuked it. Well, they captioned everything single one of those sounds. I'm like, oh my God, that’s what I call overload. Too much. I'm like it’s obvious. And those sounds are not important. So, he’s not in hiding where he has to be quiet and he's making all this noise plopping. And then you do want to note when there’s a long period of silence. Otherwise we start wondering if something is wrong with the caption? That's what happened. I remember there was the opening of a show, I can still see it in my mind, and I'm watching it and I’m like, I can’t tell if there’s music or if there’s, I didn’t have my implant on, my bionic ear on and I’m like, is the caption messed up? I mean it went on for a really long time. So that can be resolved easily with a temporal note down, [Silence] that kind of thing. So we do need to know when there is no sound. Otherwise we start wondering if there’s problems.

Jeff Frick:
It's funny, when I make posts with, when I don't have video, if I'm making a post from a podcast and I put closed caption against, you know, a slide, I put, I put an audio waveform just so that there's something to fill in between when the captions are on and off, so that you can see there's, you know, it didn't pause, it didn't stop. You know, it didn't, it didn't freak out. But do you know the expression Foley, Foley effects. Do you know Foley effects? From making movies? So basically, the Foley effects guy, is the guy that makes...The microwave door,

Meryl Evans:
Foley, yeah. Oh, Foley, Foley, yes, F O L E Y, okay.

Jeff Frick:
Yeah, so maybe the director of that other show must be a Foley guy. So he just likes all those sounds and wants to make sure they all get their proper credit. That's hilarious.

Meryl Evan*:
Yeah. Well, I have seen those podcast clips you’re talking about, the very short teaser clip. And a lot of them for a while, I haven’t seen any lately thankfully because I find the waves distracting. I was having a hard time paying attention to the caption, when it kept basically doing this to me and I can't read the caption when it’s constantly fluttering in my face. So, it bothers me. I can't speak for everybody, of course. I just find it distracting, but I am not ADHD or have certain disabilities that might be easily distracted by something like that. Or, they may benefit from it because sometimes people who have ADHD benefit from having the motion so they can focus better because they need to have two things going on. I know because my whole family has it. So I know how that goes sometimes.

Jeff Frick:
Okay. Another topic: Identifying speakers. So most of my videos are pretty simple. It's talking head and it's either a single shot or a double shot. And so I, I, unless it's not obvious, I try to keep the closed caption in the middle. If we speak over one another, which happens, then usually I'll put the name, you know, Jeff said this and Meryl said this. Is that the right way? Do bounce it back and forth? I think you often talk about the tennis effect. You don't like tennis match spectating in terms of the back and forth with your head.

Meryl Evans:
Simply you can put the person’s name in brackets, that’s it. Just [Meryl] in brackets. So if we’re both kind of talking, like when I was saying ‘right, right’ when you were saying something, they can put both lines. Put your line and my line saying right with my name. Yours with your name [Jeff]. And that will keep it clear. You're right. Talking heads don't really have a problem. And talking heads with two people generally don't have a problem because usually, whoever's speaking. I mean if the person, if the other person is speaking, but the video on the one not speaking, it’s obviously the other person speaking, and the other listening so with two people that’s pretty easy to figure out. But there have been times when two people are in a conversation on a TV show and you don't see their faces very well. And you’re like, ‘Wait, which one said that’ because that was important. But it doesn't happen often. But occasionally, though, just something important and you really need to know who said what. So it's just very easy to fix by adding the name in brackets. And that’s all she wrote.

Jeff Frick:
Okay, so this is something I don't know if it's not in any of your rules that I do, which is actually give more information in the closed caption than is in the dialog. So, for instance, if somebody says ADA [Americans with Disabilities Act] and you know, you said ADA. I might caption that if the duration works and I can get the ADA [Americans with Disabilities Act] at the end of the top line. Underneath, I might say Americans with Disabilities Act. I do that a lot with acronyms because a lot of people will speak with the acronyms, and you never know if the audience knows what those acronyms are. So I'll often use the second line to punch in the real thing. Or I’ve even... If somebody mentions a piece of research or something, sometimes I'll use that second line to put like the title of the research. I mean, I'll have it in the notes in the webpage, but it seems like, you know, a good opportunity if someone's never heard of the such and such and such and such, that if you've got space, you put it down there. So now it doesn't match, it doesn't match the dialog, but it does add interesting information that and again, most of my stuff's on demand. So you could pause it, read it, and then pick up the conversation. Have you do you anyone do that? What do you think about that? She's shaking her head.

Meryl Evans:
Usually it, generally the rule is what is said, what I heard should be captioned. Therefore, if it’s not said or heard, it shouldn't be captioned because you’re adding more load, and it’s not being said and plus, because it’s not said, the next thing, after ADA, is going to be said and that adds more text. So in that case, I would just put it in the notes or in the post itself, you know, or in the comments because that’s lots of opportunity. Just want to stick to. But there has been an interesting thing. So there’s a show called ‘What’s My Line’ and they have a lot of puns based on sounds. So one of the ones that sticks in my head, I don't know why. So, they were talking about someone who was a D.J. and you know the word ‘Holler’ ‘Holler’. You know, Holler, Holler comes up. Well, the girl with the DJ asked for a hint. So they made a joke that. ‘Challah’ as in challah the Jewish bread, you know the braided bread. It was a play on words. Holler, Challah. So what they did was, they put challah ‘c h a l l a h’ in the caption, but next to it in parenthesis was ‘h o l r n’ which is what they were, and that was well done. Because it was short and to the point. And it helped clarify the pun because some deaf people may not get the pun because I've never heard the voice. So that was clever and effective in that case. And they do that on ‘Password’. The TV, the game show ‘Password’. Well, Jimmy Fallon has a tendency to say things in a certain way to try to give people hints, like imitate an actor. The caption will let us know he's imitating. And one time, I have a video clip, he was imitating the ‘Minions’. You know, so little yellow...

Jeff Frick:
Little cartoon guys.

Meryl Evans:
And the caption said ‘Minions’. So I knew exactly what he was doing, in saying that password.

Jeff Frick:
Yeah. So he's doing it in the voice of the Minions. So they're letting you know that he's, he’s acting like the Minions. That's funny.

Meryl Evans:
Yeah.

Jeff Frick:
|o, I don’t know is...Maybe there's a future in adding more information into this thread. That's interesting. Okay. So unfortunately, though, there's a new trend that basically breaks every single one of Meryl’s rules, and it's actually part of the catalyst why I reached out to you to say, we have got to do this sooner rather than later, because I'm seeing it. I'm seeing it all over on YouTube shorts. I'm seeing it on Instagram. I don't really do TikTok, but I think it comes from TikTok. And this thing, I, it even has a name. It's called the Hormozi captions, which is I guess named after this guy I looked it up Alex Hormozi. And it's just like everything the opposite of what's in your list. It's one word at a time. It's colorful, it pops, it moves.

Meryl Evans:
The fonts change. It’s all caps. It’s all over the place. It’s lower case, it keeps changing.

Jeff Frick:
What is going on. And it just it feels like and you're in the business, that people are confusing the purpose of the closed caption to communicate information, which is what you always say. Make it clear, make it concise, make it easy to read or nothing else matters versus this new graphic element that they now can play with, that they can. They can just go crazy and throw these things in all over the place. And then the other one that came up in your in your rules, which is surprising to me is just all caps, because there's no there's no visibility in seeing a word versus reading a word if it's in all caps. So I wonder if you know, what do you think when you see these Hormozi things and all these artsy fartsy, captions out there?

Meryl Evans:
I put a video out there. It’s a side by side video of the Hormozi versus plain old boring captions and the majority of people could see why Hormozi was the problem. A few people prefer the flashy stuff but like I said it was very small. The majority do not. And it was distracting. It was harder to read. And all caps, another demo a friend of mine’s friend did. So he wrote the word ‘AIRPLANE’ in all caps he drew a square, a rectangle around it because that's the shape it makes. But when you put it in lower letters, lower case, he made a, he was able to make a shape of an airplane. So all caps have no visual. It’s the same, it’s either a square or a rectangle, depending on how long the words are. Whereas mixed case or sentence case has more visual differentiation and it makes it easier to read. And yeah, so there are a tiny percentage of the people who do better with all caps. But again, they are a tiny percentage. That's why customizing caption is the best option. And a lot of places offer all caps as an option. Then there’s my favorite ‘Karaoke Style’ caption which is basically the word is highlighted as it’s sung or spoken. That’s why I call it karaoke style and it’s so distracting. My eyes start following the karaoke and there’s not understood. Does not get the idea of the message because it’s so, it’s playing follow the ball and it’s not reading, it’s not absorbing the information. However, there are a tiny percentage of people who benefit from that as well and that is also an available option in some streaming networks where you can have each word highlighted. But when we're talking the majority, you’re neglecting that. And unfortunately, Instagram, they've got like five different variations of captions you can choose from. And the very first one changes size, is all caps. It’s just, yeah... it’s like that. And I think people just go with it because that’s the default. So it’s like, they need to make the accessible one the default, and people don’t change. Anyway, there’s a reason captions are boring and have been boring all these years. It’s because they work. They are not meant to be the show. They are not meant to be the star. The video and the content of the video is supposed to be the star and this Hormozi stuff is taking away from that. If the company making the video cannot make good content, they shouldn't be making the video at all. If they depend on their Hormozi captions to get eyeballs, to get people to pay attention, then their content could be better. That's what I think.

Jeff Frick:
Yeah, and it's like the whole video, it’s like a whole industry now of how to make those things.

Meryl Evans:
Oh my God. Yeah, you can, there’s so many websites and apps that add caption and they do the fancy stuff. And they’re giving people choices and people don't know the best practices. They don’t know these things, they don’t look into it. And I'm not frustrated with them. I just know they don’t live with captions every day like I do. That's why I'm out there educating every day. Because I can only reach a tiny percentage of the world through LinkedIn or wherever I’m posting.

Jeff Frick:
Well, hopefully we'll get a little bit more, get you a little bit more reach after this. But let's shift gears a little bit and talk about the change in technology and how that's changing everything. Because you mentioned when you were a little girl, you had some manual machine. You had to hook up to the TV. We've seen a lot of progress with it within AI and, you know, we used to use a service like Rev.ai. And I used to joke, you know, they had a person generated closed caption. Or you could buy the computer-generated closed caption. And I think the price difference was like ten x, and the computer-generated one, this is years ago, was only about an 80% solution, and you almost spent as much time fixing it as you would have had if you just tried to do it yourself. The technology has come a long way. I do my Adobe closed captions now right here on my laptop, and it's again, it's not a 100% solution, but it’s come so far. How do you see, you know, kind of the change in technology in making it a little bit easier for people to start to add this feature to their videos?

Meryl Evans:
AI can't work by itself. It needs to have human intervention because it is never 100% correct, and it also depends on the sound quality, the video quality. If we've both got microphones, good chance it’ll be more accurate than otherwise. But of course, I have an accent, a deaf accent, and those apps are biased against my accent even though most people I meet understand me, and they understand most of what I say, not 100%. So you can say my words are like an automatic caption; they’re so not completely perfect in my pronunciation. But that's okay. I know that, yeah, I joke about it.

I remember when I first tried Instagram auto captions, and it was so much work to fix it. They’ve gotten much better. I still have to fix it every time, but now it’s just a few things instead of a lot. So it's a great starting point. The key is to edit it. And they’ve saved you so much time editing. Otherwise, if you don't, just one word, one letter can throw you off, and you're confused. I have a video screenshot of a song on a Super Bowl, and one letter was wrong, and it was enough to throw the whole lyric out. I was like, it did not make sense at all. That’s how much. So, 80% is not impressive. 95% is not impressive because you're missing just enough words and letters to not get the whole idea.

Jeff Frick:
Yeah, well, if it makes you feel any better, I had a run where I was interviewing a bunch of people with British accents, and I think if I had set it up to just say British accent, it would have worked fine. But having an American accent and a British accent on the same interview, it just destroys the auto-magic closed caption. It just cannot deal with the, I don’t know if it’s because their expressions are slightly different and they're, kind of emphasis on words and their accent on words is different, but they struggled. So don't, don't feel bad. It's not just, it's not just you.

Meryl Evans:
Yeah. See, that’s another thing about automatic, AI, even if somebody was born speaking English, if they have an accent that’s British, Australian, Canadian, but they grew up that’s all they speak is English. It doesn’t work with their accent. I mean it works better than mine, but it's so different from American, standard basic American accent, not something that’s really heavy, you know, like maybe Boston, or...

Jeff Frick:
Right.

Meryl Evans:
Sorry, no offense Boston. I’m just trying to think of an example of how, well sometimes the southern draw might be hard to tell. So AI is biased and then that it expects perfect American English with no emphasis, no heavy accent in the way.

Jeff Frick:
Yeah, yeah. So, shifting gears a little bit, about with Covid and what happened with, with, Covid. So you gave your TED talk after Covid. So congratulations on your TED talk.

Meryl Evans:
Thank you.

Jeff Frick:
One of the themes that comes up over and over, whether it's the future of work or many, many things, is that Covid was an accelerant to things that were already underway. And you talk about normalizing in your TED talk with your son, you know, that it's normalized to have text on screen. For me, I think, you know, when the NFL did the draft and Goodell was in his basement, you know, that kind of normalized video calls and, you know, it made it. If the NFL can do it, you know, then that then it's okay. So Covid really changed I think everyone's perception of closed captions, everyone's acceptance of closed captions, the perceived value outside of an ADA context. So I wonder if you can speak about how Covid has kind of changed people's reception to your messaging.

Meryl Evans:
Well like you said Jeff, Covid accelerated the need to put captions out there because before Covid, Zoom, Microsoft Teams, they did not have captions. And after Covid, like within four, five months, they had them. But it was complicated on how to turn them on. In fact, I still run into Zoom accounts that don't have captions turned on yet. They don't know it. There’s one step every single Zoom account must do one time and one time only, then everything, it’ll always have captions. But I still have, two weeks ago I ran into an account that didn't have it turned on yet. So that, that's what happens when a product is not born accessible. If Zoom had built the product with captions from the beginning, it wouldn’t be this complicated, but that's another story. So as we all went to video calls all the time, people were finding they needed captions not just the deaf and hard of hearing but others, and it was just a huge step toward normalizing accessibility. So I use captions as a great starting point. So when we all see it, and we run into it every day, it becomes no big deal.

Jeff Frick:
Right.

Meryl Evans:
Therefore, accessibility, all accessibility, should be like that. We need to learn to accept there will always be ramps in the right places. Now ADA says that you have to have a ramp if you have a building, right? But it does not mean that you have to put it in the best place. And, it just says you have to have a ramp. It doesn’t say how to make it a good experience. So for example, you have a restaurant. You put the ramp around the back of the restaurant, but all your customers are coming in the front. It's not fair for that one customer who uses a wheelchair to have to go around the back. That’s not a good user experience. So, that's was that’s my whole, captions have definitely exploded because of the pandemic. We’re seeing so, so many apps. I mean, my guide has a list of apps. The list keeps getting longer. And I'm like, I don't know, why some company bother with it? Because there’s too much competition now.

Jeff Frick:
Yeah.

Meryl Evans:
So I hope that carries over to other accessibility things.

Jeff Frick:
Yeah, it's good news. I mean, I had Ryan Anderson on from MillerKnoll, big design company, and they talk about inclusive design. So trying to think of the person who needs the help first. And if you designed with them in mind, generally there's benefits to everybody else too. You know, even as this closed caption thing, as we've been talking about it, benefits a lot more than just people who can't hear. There's all these kind of secondary benefits that maybe people don't think about, or maybe not as obvious until they till they get into it a little bit.

Meryl Evans:
Yeah, that's why I always... So there’s a great cartoon. A whole bunch of people trying to get into a building and there is snow all over the ground and the person shoveling is shoveling the snow off the steps. And a person who uses a wheelchair says, "Well, if you shovel the ramp first then we can all get in." And the person says, "When I'm finished with shoveling the steps, I’ll do the ramp." It's like, oh my God, clear the ramp before you clear the stairs and you’ll get everybody in. That simple. Universal design.

Jeff Frick:
That is really really... That's a good one. So simple and, so simple and clear I love it.

All right. Well, Meryl, we’re getting to the end of our time. And I've really enjoyed it. I got a few more questions, but I want to give you the last word. To kind of encourage people, what should they think about when they think about captions? You know, what are the most common problems that you see that people have that they have to get over so that they can have better captions on their media and get better leverage on their media?

Meryl Evans:
Well, there’s a lot of things I see. But I will say, captions are not meant to be your brand. They're not meant to represent your brand. In other words, if your brand colors are orange and white, the captions are not going to be orange and white if you want them to be accessible. In fact, orange and white are not accessible colors because the contrast is very small. So somebody who has trouble with that is not going to be able to see your words at all. And if they have the sound off, that’s even worse. So stick with boring captions, more people will get your message, more people will benefit, and you will get to expand your reach.

Jeff Frick:
Great. Well, thank you, Meryl. It's been a real treat. And if they need more information, they can go to Meryl.net. There's all kinds of information and side-by-side comparisons and statistics on the use of captions for people that aren't hard of hearing or just a ton of wealth of information. And what's the best way for them to contact you?

Meryl Evans: \
They can go through Meryl.net or email me at Me - M E at Meryl.net, me@meryl.net.

Jeff Frick:
And you're on LinkedIn and Twitter and all these other platforms too, right?

Meryl Evans:
Oh yeah. LinkedIn is good.

Jeff Frick:
All right. Well, Meryl, thanks again. It's been a real treat. And glad we were finally able to get this together.

Meryl Evans:
Yeah, me too, Jeff. It was a real treat for me too.

Jeff Frick:
All right. She's Meryl, I'm Jeff. You're watching "Turn the Lens." Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. Thanks for listening on the podcast. Take care.

Cold Close
Thank you.
That was great, Meryl.
That was good. I was very happy with it.

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