Yes to subtitles

I write in support of Delia Henry from Action on Hearing Loss Scotland about the independence debate on STV (Letters, 7 August).

The subtitles on the main broadcast soon lost track of the debate and many people with hearing loss would have missed out completely.

Subtitling has improved immensely over the last couple of years, but it will struggle with two speakers shouting at the same time. May I suggest that the TV company devotes more resources to the subtitling.

They need a subtitler for each participant and a tweak to the technology to allow both inputs to be placed side by side on the screen.

That would also give everyone an immediate feel as to how well the protagonists engage with each other’s ideas.

Second, the chairman has to enforce some basic ground rules that allow civilised debate. This was not supposed to be shouting to the death, it was meant to be an exchange of views about a very important topic.

Nobody is much enlightened when someone asks a question and then shouts down the answer.

We are, after all, being asked to believe that people in Scotland can make democracy work, more effectively than they do in Westminster.

I find there is an interesting side effect to growing increasingly deaf.

Sometimes when you don’t hear very much, it becomes more obvious whether or not somebody has anything worth saying.

Ian Taylor

Manse Road

Edinburgh