Jim Rossman: Turning off captions shouldn’t be this hard
Published in Science & Technology News
This week a reader writes, “We have four Sony TVs, which we set up with YouTube TV and Roku streaming sticks a couple years ago. A couple weeks ago, one TV started displaying closed captions on every channel, and we have tried everything to get rid of them. Talked to the Geek Squad, followed all online instructions to turn off captions, used Sony remote CC button, even contacted Sony. We tried to chat with Roku tech support, but they wanted to charge for it.
"Any suggestions or do we just have to ignore the captions until the TV dies?"
Answer: This was an interesting problem, because in the age of smart TVs and streaming, there are multiple places to turn on captions.
The reader had already tried the Sony closed caption settings to no avail.
Since the TVs are getting their programming from a Roku streaming stick, I next instructed her to hit the Roku remote’s home button and navigate down to Settings, then to the Accessibility settings and check the Caption options at the top of that page.
She replied that was the next place they’d tried, but the captions were set to off in the Roku settings as well.
Finally, I sent her to the caption settings for the YouTube TV app.
So, when you’re watching a channel in YouTube TV, pressing pause will bring up the show’s timeline. Down by the timeline you’ll see a small CC icon that is the caption preferences for YouTube TV.
She replied back that we’d found the answer. “We never noticed that CC icon before and of all the people we talked to, no one ever suggested that,” she said. “You saved what little bit of sanity we have left.”
It’s a shame that there are three different places where you need to look, but since the Roku could be running on a TV from dozens of different manufacturers, it makes passing those settings from the Roku to the TV or from the TV to the Roku impossible.
In a perfect world, turning on captions anywhere would tell your TV setup that you want captions on for anything you happen to be watching.
We aren’t in that perfect world just yet.
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