Determine whether U.S. broadcast caption quality has declined

Determine whether caption quality on broadcast television in the United States has declined overall or whether the lower quality observed in the study is an artifact of the broadcasters and television programs available in the Washington, D.C., recording sample.

Background

The study reports lower Number, Edition and Recognition (NER) scores for its 70 broadcast television clips than scores reported in several prior evaluations, with fewer clips meeting the acceptable NER threshold of 98. This discrepancy could indicate a broader decline in U.S. broadcast caption quality, but it could instead result from the particular broadcasters, programs, or caption providers represented in the sample.

Resolving this uncertainty would clarify whether the study’s findings reflect a national trend or are specific to the sampled television content and production workflows.

References

This merits asking whether caption quality has declined in the U.S. overall, or whether this is simply an artifact of the broadcasters and TV programs that were available to us where the study was conducted.

— Are Caption Metrics Broken? Latency, Deaf and Hard of Hearing User Ratings, and Bias across Technologies  (2609.11408 - Thompson et al., 10 Sep 2026) in Section 6, “Caption Quality Trends on Broadcast TV”