Eye Gaze Behaviour and Comprehension of Colour Commentary and Gameplay Captions of Live Fast-Paced Sports for Deaf and Hard of Hearing Television Viewers

Closed Captioning is a service displaying the speech-based audio and limited sound effects of digital media as text on screen, providing access to that content for audiences who are d/Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing (d/D/HoH), or in situational impairments such as viewing in a hospital waiting room with muted audio or a noisy bar with inaudible volume. Live captioning in fast-paced sports tends to have a faster presentation speed than most viewers can read. In this paper, we introduce a new captioning style for live captioned sports, which only displays the colour commentary component of the speech-based audio, rather than the conventional captions for the play-by-play announcing with the colour commentary. This approach reduces the number of words compared to the conventional style. A study is designed to compare d/Deaf and HoH eye behaviour, preference, perceived quality satisfaction, and comprehension from watching video clips of live broadcast fast sports with two captioning conditions to investigate behavioural patterns, correlations between quality factors and satisfaction, and comprehension of d/D and HoH participants. The main findings revealed a difference between the two groups’ eye behaviour, preference, satisfaction, and comprehension when watching different types of captioning.