Of bad hombres and nasty women; the quality of the live closed captioning in the 2016 US final presidential debate

After decades of dedicating good efforts to increase the amount of television programing accessible to the hearing impaired, awareness about the need to deliver better closed captions has grown in the last years. As a result, the focus has been moved from the quantity to the quality of the accessibility services provided. In an attempt to explore the subtitles currently delivered on television, this paper presents the main findings of a study aimed at analyzing the quality of the live closed captions provided during one of the most relevant political events of 2016: the final presidential debate in the United States. A corpus of more than 9,400 captions was analyzed according to the quality criteria defined by the Federal Communications Commission. The results obtained shed light on the completeness, placement, synchronicity and accuracy of the captions, but they also elicit interesting questions in terms of reception.