Captions are on almost every screen these days, and they can be a huge help for people with hearing loss. Unfortunately, precisely because they can help, a lot of older people don’t use them, worried about calling attention to their faltering hearing.
But good news! Young people use captions at a significantly higher rate than older people. Use captions and maybe you can pass as a millennial. Not really. Use captions because they’ll help you stay connected to the world.
Television. Most TV’s now make caption access easy, and many offer Bluetooth connection as well. My television is set to automatically provide captions and these can be very helpful, especially for movies or recorded shows. Captions on live transmissions like news and sports are often much less satisfying. The captions are slow, inaccurate, and out of sync, for reasons that are baffling. Even pre-recorded segments often have bad captions. Since the audience for TV news skews older, and since hearing loss is far more common in older people, it’s surprising that TV captions remain abysmal. Newer TV’s also offer Bluetooth, connecting the sound directly to your hearing aid. Bluetooth sound quality on phones is good, but on TV (at least for me) voices sound mechanical and the volume is often too loud, and hard to adjust.
Smart Phones, either Apple or Android, can provide invaluable benefits for people with hearing loss. Most new hearing aids can be programmed to send sound via Bluetooth to your hearing aid or cochlear implant. Captions supplement that sound if you need more.
For telephone calls, I use InnoCaption and have for several years. It uses live captioners, although occasionally it will ask permission to switch to automatic captions. (You can decline.) It captions incoming and outgoing calls, it uses your own cell-phone number, and it leaves you a transcript of the caller’s side of the conversation. That means if you can’t remember the time of the medical appointment you just made, it’s easy to check the transcript. Like all the accommodations mentioned here, Innocaption is free. It works on Apple and Android phones.
Podcasts, music and video can all be captioned. Apple Live Captions provide accurate, synced captions on all types of audio. So does Spotify. Google Live Transcribe provides similar access for Android users.
Don’t forget texts. If you’re the sender, hands-free is easy. Just click on the microphone icon to dictate. Many other programs also allow dictation if you enable it in your settings.
Computers. You can set your Apple computer to activate the Live Captions accessibility tool and captions will appear automatically on any video or audio. You can turn off the captions on a specific video by clicking on the “x,” which you’ll want to do if captions are already embedded in the video. The captions will still be there next time. Google Live Transcribe is not available on a PC, but you can use a workaround, which involves an “emulater.” I don’t trust myself to describe it accurately, so click on the link.
Live conversations. Your phone can also caption live conversations, although the more ambient noise there is, the harder it is to get captions. I use Otter, designed as a transcription device. It’s more or less accurate depending on the listening environment. It needs a strong wifi connection for live captions. For Android phones, Google Live Transcribe provides the same accommodation.
Zoom. Zoom has changed the way many of us work and socialize. At our New York City Chapter of the Hearing Loss Association of America, all of our public meetings are on Zoom. We begin the program by explaining the basics of Zoom, how to enable captions, how to ask a question, how to use the Chat, and so on. Recently Zoom has made captioning available for all Zoom programs. The administrator must activate them. Other meeting platforms, including Google Meet, Microsoft Teams and others also provide captioning created either by a live CART captioner or by automatic speech recognition.
This is not a complete summary of caption availability. Please share your experiences in the comments section. Meanwhile, don’t forget that 18-45 year olds have no qualms about using captions. Neither should you.
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Here’s more info on the caption-use age disparity: According to an August AP-NORC Poll, a third of American adults say they use captions “always or often.” Among younger adults (age 18-44), about 40 percent use captions always or often. Among adults 45 or older, only 28 percent do. The reasons the two age groups cite for using captions are different. Older adults say it’s because they have difficulty understanding accents (52 percent) or because they have a hearing impairment (23 percent). Younger adults cite watching in a noisy environment (40 percent) or multitasking (30 percent). The overall reason for using captions, cited by 55 percent of all polled, is “wanting to catch every word”.
Hmmm. Only 28 twenty-eight percent of older adults use captions and of those only 23 percent say it’s because they have a hearing impairment. Statistics are slippery but I think we can agree that those figures suggest that a lot of older people with hearing loss are not using captions and if they are, it’s not because of acknowledged hearing loss.
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For more about living with hearing loss, read my memoir Shouting Won’t Help, and for more practical advice try Smart Hearing. Both are available as Kindle or paperback.
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Katherine Bouton: Smart Hearing 
thank you. Robert Broker Sent from my iPhone
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And thank you for reading.
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This so helpful, Katherine. BTW, I am not (quite yet) hard of hearing but I leave the caption function on when I watch TV. It just makes dialogue clearer. I think a lot of people are doing that. #notamillennial
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I love that hashtag #notamillennial. My millennial kids use captions all the time.
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ps that was me, your friend Katha
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Hah. I had no idea.
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My second-biggest complaint about captions (besides their quality, speed, and inaccuracy) is that some of my favorite television programs are captioned from other languages (such as from Walter Presents in Britbox) — but when someone in the program speaks English, suddenly the captions disappear, because the captions are only used to translate from French, Danish, German, Czech, Italian, etc., to English. Sometimes the English spoken in these programs is considerable.
Oh, and then there are commercials — but I just assume that the companies that don’t have theirs captioned just don’t want HoH customers? Okay, bad decision, but I don’t need their business.
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I agree that the absence of captions for commercials clearly aimed at old (er) people is baffling. Don’t they want us to know what they’re saying? It’s hard enough when they don’t tell you the condition their drug treats, but not making sure we hear how wonderful the mystery drug is doesn’t make sense.
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Thank you for this great article. I find that captioning enhances the viewing experience, and it is necessary for those of us with hearing loss or deafness. The one thing that needs to change is when captions lag more than five seconds behind the audio. That can make following along confusing and distracting. What are your thoughts?
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I totally agree about lagging captions. Talk about multitasking!
You’re trying to hear what’s being said real time and reading what was said 5-10 seconds earlier.
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don’t forget the app Galapro. It provides captions for Broadway shows.
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Yes, Thank you for mentioning it. The captioning starts being available a few weeks after the show opens. You use the theater’s Gala Pro device, or you can use your own smartphone but that can be more confusing. If you are really a theater love, TDF-TAP offers open captioned performances of Broadway and off Broadway shows. There’s usually only one captioned performance for shorter running shows, often none for the most popular, but they’re a great way to see a show. You can Google TDF-TAP.
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We, who have all different kinds of hearing loss, have been blessed to have closed captioning technology available.
The only specific area that is TRULY missing is closed captioning at churches when pastors are speaking, not songs only. Have been fighting for this…and no success yet…
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Some churches and other houses or worship have installed hearing loops, but I think captioning is more universally accessible. Thanks for commenting.
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I, too, have been fighting with my church board for the same reason, unfortunately with no luck. I use live transcribe for the sermons, but the results are truly comical. It doesn’t pick up half of what is being said and what it does pick up is far from what is being said!
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Good to keep a sense of humor… The new listening system Auracast, not really available in most places but coming, should work well in churches and other venues of that size.
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Hi Katherine, We stream a lot and find the captions aesthetically well done on Netflix, Apple, PBS and HBO Max. But Prime Video captions are too large so they obscure half of the picture. Amazon claims that it’s possible to adjust the settings but I’ve tried to as recently as yesterday and was unsuccessful. If anyone has had success with this please share it with us. Beth Friedman
Sent from Yahoo Mail for iPhone
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Beth, I have a Verizon set top box that allows me to adjust caption settings that apply to most programs we watch, whether streaming or not. Is this applicable to your situation?
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Thank you for adding that information. I hope it’s helpful. I recently gave up Verizon but I don’t remember a set-top box that allowed me to adjust caption size and placement.
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Love closed captions and keep them on my TV at all times. My only issue is that some stations challenge my reading speed and will put an entire paragraph on the screen at one time and remove it before I can finish reading it! Other times they are slow posting the closed captions and a commercial comes on freezing words mid-sentence and incomplete! Not perfect but better than nothing.
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I’ve never seen the entire paragraph on the screen, but I’m way too familiar with the mid-sentence incomplete with the captions stuttering right through the commercial. Surely they can do better! Thanks for writing. I think my WordPress platform must be making it difficult to post under your own name — Sorry about that.
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You said you use Innocaption for live phone captioning. I started with Olelo, which later became CaptionCall by Sorenson. I have liked it in the past but have my doubts now. I am prelingually HoH (profound) and have a deaf accent. CaptionCall is designed to caption what I say as well as what the other end says. Unfortunately, what I say is nearly always garbled, probably because automatic speech recognition has trouble understanding me. The person at the other end of the call also has trouble understanding me. I have used Innocaption before, but I left it because printed copies of Innocaption transcriptions show only what the other end says. I need to find a way to make live calls more tolerable. Can you advise? Thank you.
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This is a tough one. It sounds like you are looking for something that would more accurately caption your own words as well as the caller’s, right? And that you would be able to access a transcript of both sides of the call? I don’t know of a captioning service that provides that. Maybe other readers do? If so, please comment. One workaround would be to put your phone on speaker and use a captioning app like Otter or Google Transcribe. Both sides of the conversation would be captioned. But those transcripts while useful in real time are not very helpful if you want to go back and review what was said.
But you also say you want the caller at the other end to be able to understand what you say. I don’t know how that could happen unless the caller had their own captioning system. Maybe I’m missing something. If anyone reading this has an idea, please respond in the comment section. Thank you for writing and I’m sorry not to be more helpful.
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