Captions with Intention

Caption with Intention – 2025 a Landmark Year

2025 has been a landmark year in the development of captioning systems to ensure inclusivity for Deaf and Hard of Hearing audiences.

A dynamic closed captioning campaign from FCB Chicago, Chicago Hearing Society and Rakish Entertainment succeeded in designing a fully inclusive new way of captioning for Deaf and Hard of Hearing viewers. On April 29th, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences awarded Captions with Intention a Scientific and Technical Award of Merit. Subsequently, in June, the groundbreaking captioning system was awarded a Titanium Lion at Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.

https://www.captionwithintention.org/

What is Caption with Intention?

The Caption with Intention website officially describes the system as, ‘A dynamic captioning system that adds unprecedented emotion, context, and clarity to enhance the viewing experience for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing communities.’

The elements which differentiate Captions with Intention from standard subtitles and/or closed captions can be outlined as below:

• Attribution…

Each character within a video will be assigned (attributed) a colour from a set spectrum of colours, so that Deaf and Hard of Hearing viewers can easily ascertain who is speaking. The captions start out as a standard line of white text, but highlight in the different colour as the character speaks, to allow for adequate reading time.

• Synchronization…

While captions will display as white text on a black box to begin with, to ensure enough time to read captions, each word will bounce up and increase by 15% in size as it is spoken. This helps viewers reading the captions to understand the overall timing and emphasis of the speech. It’s also very useful for comedic timing.

• Intonation…

One of the biggest barriers to Deaf and Hard of Hearing viewers in obtaining an equal viewing experience is the fact that text alone cannot reflect tone and emphasis. By increasing and decreasing text size and weight as captions flow, audiences can gage which words are spoken louder or in a whisper. Animations also help to convey tone in terms of speed of the movement, and capitalisations, etc, for shouting.

How to Caption with Intention

There is currently no service to fully automate Captions with Intention. however, the creators suggest that, ‘In the future, our aim is to develop automation for the system, allowing more and more people to enjoy movies and TV like never before.’ The system was developed with support from Chicago Hearing Society and is also expected to evolve over time.

While most caption formats can be exported simply through professional captioning software, Captions with Intention work with a much more tailored approach. As a subtitle format, the changes, colours and animations definitely require a human captioner to work through decisions on how best to display the captions. In addition, text animations involve more specialist video editing and animation software, such as After Effects.

At Capital Captions, we are able to supply Captions with Intention for a per video minute fee. Quotes can be supplied following on from receiving a video example, as the time involved in working with animations, etc, will be greatly influenced by a number of factors, including, number of speakers, the complexity and emotivity of dialogue, the amount of music and/or sound effects requiring description, as well as other factors.

If you would like your captions to be fully inclusive for Deaf and Hard of Hearing audiences, as well as more dynamic and engaging for all, please do get in touch.

Contact info@capitalcaptions.com for a quote for Captions with Intention for your projects today.