T minus 14 days to ATypI Brighton 2007: Captioning
If you watch captioned TV (not “subtitled” TV in any sense) for two hours a night five nights a week for a year, you’ll read over 4 million words. That’s a lot of words. We’ve been putting a lot of working into making the type on office-computer screens more readable (on Windows, mostly). But that isn’t all we’re reading offa screens.
Calculations
Jensema (1996) surveyed reading speeds of many television genres and display forms (scrollup vs. pop-on). Working solely from his reported averages, in words per minute (wpm) and per hour (wph):
- Scrollup: 151 wpm = 9,060 wph
- Pop-on: 138 wpm = 8,280 wph
Assume 25% of your viewing is scrollup, 75% pop-on. Two hours a night, then, equals:
0.25 × 2 × 9,060 + 0.75 × 2 × 8,280 = 16,950 words/night
Over 5 nights a week for 52 weeks, you’re reading 4,407,000 words a year.
If we assumed all scrollup captioning, the figure is 4,711,200. With all pop-on captioning, it’s 4,305,600. So the order of magnitude is the same.
Even if you do the same calculation with the very slowest captioning reported by Jensema (74 wpm), simply an impossible scenario even for young children abandoned in front of the TV by their moms, the order of magnitude is still comparable – 2.3 million. (With the maximum, 231 wpm, it’s 7.2 million.)
That’s a lot of words. While you’re lying on the couch. And relaxing. And not “working.” Now you can see why I think caption fonts are important.