I don't care much if other people use captions or not, but I like to use them. They are useful whether or not you can hear it (I usually can hear it, but there

I don't care much if other people use captions or not, but I like to use them. They are useful whether or not you can hear it (I usually can hear it, but there are reasons why it might be difficult for anyone to hear, e.g. other people in the room are arguing loudly). They are not a substitute for having audio settings; I use both audio and captions. I watch TV with captions on for several reasons: - Sometimes it is difficult to understand what they are saying, e.g. someone else not on the TV is talking (or other noises outside), or they speak with a strong accent, or I simply missed something, or the audio is unclear or the volume is low (or muted). - To know the spelling of something which is unknown (e.g. a character's name). - To know the name of some music. Not all shows have this, but sometimes they do describe this. - To pay attention better. - There are others, too. Sometimes the descriptions are rather worthless, e.g. "male announcer reads text on screen". (This might sometimes be relevant to a plot in a TV show, but I have only seen it in the notices between shows, where such a thing is completely worthless, whether or not you can hear it.) And, sometimes the captions are just badly written (with misspellings, missing words, wrong words, etc), even if it is not worthless; if something is unknown they should try to figure out what they said before writing it. Sometimes the caption writer might have to review the scripts, talk to the people on the show, and/or watch the entire show, before writing any captions, in order to do so correctly, but they rarely do all of that stuff. On the TV I set up to use opaque outlined fixpitch text but with a translucent background. (I find this easier to read than an opaque or transparent background.) However, on DVD subtitles you cannot change the font, and no DVD player I have is able to change the colour or opacity of DVD subtitles even though their working should make this possible. Fortunately, some DVDs have captions and so this is not a problem. Some shows have open captions. I dislike this, because then I cannot change the font. I think closed captions are better, even if it is a strong accent or if the speech is in a different language from the text. A feature I would like on the TV (but which I have not seen) is a "caption scrollback" feature, so that you can view a menu of captions which have previously been played (including hidden captions, which they ought to sometimes do e.g. for clues on Jeopardy!).