Time spent viewing captions on television programs

The eye movements of 23 deaf subjects, ages 14 to 61 years, were recorded 3 0 times per second while the subjects watched four 2.5-minute captioned tel evision programs. The eye movement data were analyzed to determine the perc entage of time each subject actually looked at the captions on the screen. It was found that subjects gazed at the captions 84% of the time, at the vi deo picture 14% of the time, and off the video 2% of the time. Age, sex, an d educational level appeared to have little influence on time spent viewing captions. When caption speed increased from the slowest speed (100 words p er minute, or wpm) to the fastest speed (180 wpm), mean percentage of time spent gazing at captions increased only from 82% to 86%. A distinctive char acteristic of the data was the considerable variation from subject to subje ct and also within subjects (from video to video) in regard to percentage o f time spent gazing at captions.