Watch It, Don’t Imagine It: Creating a Better Caption-Occlusion Metric by Collecting More Ecologically Valid Judgments from DHH Viewers

ABSTRACT Television captions blocking visual information causes dissatisfaction among Deaf and Hard of Hearing (DHH) viewers, yet existing caption evaluation metrics do not consider occlusion. To create such a metric, DHH participants in a recent study imagined how bad it would be if captions blocked various on-screen text or visual content. To gather more ecologically valid data for creating an improved metric, we asked 24 DHH participants to give subjective judgments of caption quality after actually watching videos, and a regression analysis revealed which on-screen contents’ occlusion related to users’ judgments. For several video genres, a metric based on our new dataset out-performed the prior state-of-the-art metric for predicting the severity of captions occluding content during videos, which had been based on that prior study. We contribute empirical findings for improving DHH viewers’ experience, guiding the placement of captions to minimize occlusions, and automated evaluation of captioning quality in television broadcasts.