I'm a hearing person, but because English is my wife's second language, we've kept CC on constantly since she moved in. I've found it an asset even to me, because there are things you miss while listening, but I've also noticed the spread in quality. Sometimes (rarely) it's excellent. More often it's mediocre. And far too frequently it's execrable.
There is, of course, an obvious difference between captioning of pre-recorded scripted programs and those that are live (or even pseudo-live, like The Daily Show, which is recorded around 7 every night and transmitted at 11). But even the pre-recorded ones, depending on the network, can be abysmal. Live shows use a "scrolling" format, where letters come onto the screen one after another like you're watching a telex printout. The better pre-recorded shows have lines appear in their entirety as they're spoken (and the very best go out of their way to place them on the screen so they don't obscure any important action, and so as to indicate clearly which actor is speaking). While they make some mistakes with transcription (whether because they didn't get the script on time or they simply didn't care), they at least make a reasonable effort to convey the original program to the hearing-impaired.
Some stations, however, like FX and AMC, use the scrolling format even for live broadcasts, and when they do so it is usually abysmal. "I work a lot with clay" becomes "I will go out with clay". Similar egregious errors are so commonplace that in many cases one would have absolutely no idea what anyone was talking about. And a lot of the time they simply skip over big chunks of dialogue because they'd be too difficult to type.
Similarly, they frequently simply skip non-English dialogue, replacing it with [Speaking Spanish] or the like, apparently with the assumption that all hearing-impaired people are monolingual anglophones. (Amusingly, I once saw CBC Newsworld's captioning during an English-language interview with Jean Chrétien resort to: "......[Speaking Foreign Language]".]
Then there are the problems with live or semi-live television. Last night's Daily Show transcribed "I am Jon Stewart, our guest tonight is Bill O'Reilly" as "I AM I DON'T KNOW STEWART, WHAT TIME IS IT O'REILLY". And while CBC tries better than many other stations (looking at you, CNN), their captioners still have a tendency to elide names and places (especially foreign ones) with pronouns. A story about Mahmoud Ahmedinajad will replace every instance of his name in captioning with "he" or (very rarely) "the President".
If this annoys me, I can only imagine what it must be like for the hearing-impaired. Canadian regulatory agencies mostly seem concerned with making sure some form of captioning gets on the air, not with ensuring it's at all useful. What do other babblers (especially hearing-impaired babblers -- Boom Boom, please weigh in) think about this?
