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A love note to captions
I love captions. They’ve been present my entire life. I have them on for everything I watch: TV shows, movies, YouTube videos, and IG videos.
As a kid, I used to find them a tad annoying. Sometimes, they blocked parts of the screen that I thought I wanted to see. Other times, I found myself reading instead of watching what was happening. But more important than these two items was that the captions helped my parents understand fast-spoken English. Though, seeing the words and being able to read them is entirely different from understanding them. Movies were often paused while my brother and I explained phrases and words.
Now, I appreciate them because they enhance my enjoyment and understanding of media. I’ve never been good at audio learning (I remain steadfast in this despite just learning that learning styles are a myth). I have trouble understanding accents of all kinds — this is true for me in both English and Mandarin — which means I’m slower to understand any dialogue that includes an accent. Captions help me learn word pronunciations, keep track of character names for me, and inform me about scenes I might’ve missed. On YouTube videos, I’m set at 1.5–2x playback speed, and with captions enabled, I can quickly read through whatever they’re saying.
