Karl Fredal: Nonverbal Aspects of Speech that
Captioning Can’t Account For 
[Articulating Betweenity]
Captioning CODA
Karl Fredal: Nonverbal Aspects of Speech that
Ironically enough, attending to captioning and therein, thinking somewhat through a “deaf lens” (what Lennard Davis might call, developing Deaf Theory), Karl notes that he has also learned to be attentive to the various extralinguistic (sublinguistic?) elements that accompany speech. Spoken words are, he suggests, mere words and there is so much more that comes along with communication and “language” that a captioner might consider. While he (rightly) notes that currently captioning—as it is commonly used in modern media—doesn’t have the “capability to take a lot of those things and put them in written format,” there is also now some push for a more robust form of captioning that would, in fact, include more of these elements. One scholar of technical communication and rhetoric, Sean Zdenek, has developed a blog—and scholarship as well—around this very idea of the art and rhetoric of captioning. Zdenek’s website/blog, Accessible Rhetoric, features articles on such clever and meaningful caption-related topics as:
Captioned hypnosis: [how] Recurring sounds on TV shows allow us to explore questions of consistency and accuracy in closed captioning.
Closed captioners don’t caption sounds. Closed captioners don't caption sounds in isolation. They caption shows.
Captioned silence? In some well-defined situations, silence must be captioned.
Manner of speaking: When a character's accent is meaningful or when a scene or line of dialogue hinges on how a character speaks, manner of speech needs to be indicated in the closed captions.
