First Attempt to an Easy-to-Read Adaptation of Repetitions in Captions

Mari Carmen Suárez-Figueroa, Isam Diab, Álvaro González, Jesica Rivero Espinosa

Abstract: Subtitles of audiovisual content produced in the same language as the oral discourse are called captions. Such type of subtitles is crucial to ensure that audiovisual resources have inclusive and equal access for people with functional diversity. When talking about people with reading comprehension difficulties, captions must be written in easy reading. During the subtitling process, it is important to bear in mind that the oral mode includes some unique characteristics such as the use of punctual reiterations or redundancies. However, excessive repetition in the written mode slows down reading and makes it difficult to understand. Currently, repetition is not considered as a problematic aspect in the Easy-to-Read (E2R) Methodology, since this linguistic resource is not frequent in the written mode. Despite this, we believe that some features of the oral mode, such as repetitions, should be considered within the captioning process. Hence, our current research is focused on discovering whether captions with repetitions, coming from the oral mode, can be a problem for people with cognitive disabilities. To achieve such a goal, we performed a user study whose main goal is to find out whether people with reading comprehension difficulties prefer audiovisual captions with or without repetitions. Initial findings indicate that captions without repetitions are the most preferred ones. For this reason, we have also created a method for automatically adapting repetitions in captions following an E2R approach.