Verbatim Captioning

A captioning approach that reproduces every spoken word exactly as uttered, including filler words, false starts, and repetitions. Regulators in many countries (e.g., the Canadian CRTC, the US FCC) emphasize verbatim accuracy as a quality requirement. Verbatim captions preserve fidelity and meet regulatory mandates, but at high speech rates — common in live sports and news — they can exceed viewers’ reading speed, divide visual attention, and reduce comprehension. This tension underlies ongoing debate about editing, paraphrasing, and reduced-caption approaches.