On the Ice and In the Zone: Exploring User Experiences with Captioning in Fast-Paced Live Sports
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Watching live sports is an immersive experience, but for Deaf and Hard of Hearing (D/HoH) viewers, accessibility barriers might disrupt understanding and spectator flow. Live captioning, which provides access to live broadcasted events for D/HoH viewers, struggles to keep pace with the game, often leading to delays, excessive text, and difficulty following fast-moving action. This research compared two different styles of live captioning: (1) Commentary-Only (CO) captioning, which captioned only colour commentary during gameplay pauses, and (2) Conventional (CN) captioning, which transcribed all spoken content. Using a mixed-methods approach, 26 D/HoH participants watched an Olympic women’s hockey game with CN and CO captions, completed questionnaires, a comprehension assessment, and interviews. Results showed that CO captioning was associated with significantly higher comprehension accuracy compared to CN. While differences in spectator flow scores were not statistically significant, some participants reported that CO helped them stay more visually focused on the game. Although cognitive load was not directly measured, participant feedback suggested that CO may have felt less text-heavy, reducing the effort required to follow along. However, participants with less hockey knowledge noted that they initially relied on CN for detailed play-by-play information. These findings challenge the assumption that verbatim captioning is always optimal and suggest CO as a viable alternative for improving accessibility in live sports broadcasting. Future research should explore long-term adaptation to CO and its real-time implementation in live sports coverage. Regarder des sports en direct est une expérience immersive, mais pour les personnes sourdes ou malentendantes (S/SM), des obstacles en matière d'accessibilité peuvent perturber la compréhension et le flux du spectateur. Le sous-titrage en direct, qui permet aux S/SM d'accéder aux événements diffusés en direct, a du mal à suivre le rythme du jeu, entraînant souvent des retards, un excès de texte et des difficultés à suivre l’action rapide. Cette recherche a comparé deux styles de sous-titrage en direct : (1) le sous-titrage uniquement des commentaires (CO), qui ne sous-titre que les commentaires de fond pendant les pauses de jeu, et (2) le sous-titrage conventionnel (CN), qui transcrit tout le contenu oral. À l’aide d’une approche méthodologique mixte, 26 participants S/SM ont regardé un match de hockey féminin olympique avec les sous-titres CN et CO, puis ont rempli des questionnaires, un test de compréhension et participé à des entretiens. Les résultats ont montré que le sous-titrage CO était associé à une précision de compréhension significativement plus élevée que le CN. Bien que les différences dans les scores de flux du spectateur ne soient pas statistiquement significatives, certains participants ont indiqué que le CO les aidait à rester plus concentrés visuellement sur le match. Bien que la charge cognitive n'ait pas été mesurée directement, les retours des participants suggèrent que le CO semblait moins chargé en texte, réduisant l’effort requis pour suivre. Toutefois, les participants ayant moins de connaissances en hockey ont indiqué qu’ils s’appuyaient initialement sur le CN pour obtenir des informations détaillées sur le déroulement du jeu. Ces résultats remettent en question l’hypothèse selon laquelle le sous-titrage mot à mot est toujours optimal et suggèrent que le CO constitue une alternative viable pour améliorer l’accessibilité dans la diffusion des sports en direct. De futures recherches devraient explorer l’adaptation à long terme au CO et sa mise en œuvre en temps réel dans les retransmissions sportives.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".