Closed Captioning seems to have a lot of problems! Misspelled words, inaccurate words matching what is said! No closed captioning or one word when the actors mouth obviously shows multiple words, or complete sentences being said. Spell check or accucheck? On computers seems to have the same problem! Why is it so hard in this day and age of computer programming for both of these to be more accurate?

I think some closed captioning is done via voice translator computers and it sucks. I sometime suspect a human translator is typing while drunk. I do hate it when the slur their words.

I used to work in the industry for about 15 years and can share some insight.

Are you talking about live programming (news, sports, etc.) or pre-recorded?

For live programming, it's a court reporter using a steno machine connected to a computer. The computer translates the steno shorthand to words. Problems arise when the operator hits a mis-stroke. Also, they sometimes don't have words in their dictionary and they try to make something that "fits".

Here's a real-life example from a live show. The dialog was "Tell me what you think about those dumplings." The captions were "Tell me what you think about those dumb Palestinians." That resulted in a viewer letter to the president of the network. The steno operators shorthand for Palestinian was pln. She didn't do a "join" correctly so the end result happened.

For pre-recorded shows, it is a mix. The caption data can be corrupted during transmission, reception, or decoding for screen display and is really hard to troubleshoot. Frequently it's a bug in the decoder.

There are quality standards required by the FCC

You can file a complaint (opens the FCC site) using this link.