why do closed captions keep pretending english is the only intelligible language? when a character speaks spanish what exactly is forcing your hand to transcribe it as "[speaks foreign language]" rather than "Si"
This intersection of Anglocentric bias + ableism and audism makes my blood boil.
People commonly defend this practise with "But the audience isn't meant to understand!" or "It's inconsequential!", neither of which actually address a) their assumption that the [ideal Anglo] audience wouldn't understand, or, perhaps most crucially in the context of CCs, b) that this is a failure of accessibility. A hearing person who speaks that "foreign" language will know exactly what's being said. A deaf or HoH person – the people CCs are primarily intended for – who speaks or reads that language should therefore have the exact same opportunity to understand. It very much feels to me like an assumption that we deaf and HoH people couldn't possibly understand any language but English, so there's no point in getting those languages transcribed for us. I hope it goes without saying how profoundly audist that sentiment is.
There is also, I think, a profound misunderstanding or ignorance of Deaf culture at play. Which is to say, CCs in English-language media are written with not only the assumption that the audience will be native English speakers, but that all d/Deaf and HoH people speak English as their first language, so all other languages are as supposedly foreign to them as they are for hearing people. But sign languages are their own distinct language. BSL, ASL, ISL, AusLan, NZSL etc ≠ English (and are indeed different from one another), LIS ≠ Italian, JSL ≠ Japanese, and so on. So, if you follow the captioners' logic to its natural extreme, all non-signed dialogue is "foreign" to many d/Deaf and HoH people and should therefore be labelled [speaks foreign language] / [speaks English] / [speaks own language] / etc. – which is, obviously, a terrible idea that perfectly highlights all the biases implicit in closed captioning.
TL;DR: your accessibility feature fails in its function as soon as you fail to transcribe all spoken languages.
As a HoH person can read very many languages, this.
Also: about the way subtitles often shorten what's said, the argument is "otherwise people would not be able to read all that quickly enough", but:
Consider that a) people who rely on subtitles usually get good at reading subtitles very quickly, and b) most literate people without relevant cognitive impairments can read text in our heads more quickly than someone can read it aloud. In other words, if there's time for the actor to say it, then there's more than enough time for the viewer to read it.
Yes, some people will still only be able to read slowly, so shortened subtitles may be an accessibility feature. But to force that rather than making it an additional option, means all other HoH people are being deprived, beyond necessity, of the experience that people with normal hearing get to enjoy, i.e. knowing what the person actually said
For those very many viewers (myself included) who can hear but not well and thus supplement that hearing with lipreading and/or closed captions where available, it is actively making things harder if the subtitles are saying one thing while the actor says another; it becomes the speech/text equivalent of green blue red blue yellow green.
