How will deaf people know if there are laugh tracks in a certain TV show or not?

The funny thing is that closed captions don't even tell you that laughter commenced. I probably know why this happened, but I wanna hear what you have to say.

Actually, sitcoms today don't even show the subtitle for audience laughter. Good try though.

First of all Closed Captions and Subtitles are different.

Closed captions tend to be little black horizontal boxes with one or two lines of text within a black background and white text.

Closed Captions DO tell you when there is background noise (baby crying, dog barking, phone ringing, glass breaking, car starting/leaving, audience laughter, etc)

If a program is live, it's much harder to add the background sounds. Although some captioning programs are just plain lazy though and simply don't include every little thing.

Subtitles are merely words on the screen that translate for another language. They don't tell you any of the background noise going on.

Subtitles are also either yellow or white text that appears on the screen. These can sometimes be hard to see, depending on the background(s) of the movies scene(s).

I much prefer Closed Captioning in comparison to subtitles. Closed Captions are more friendly to the eye, therefore the mind.

some captions do say "audience laughs," but im sure a deaf person could just look at the audiences reaction when they do those camera shots.

i wasn't trying to shoot you down, i was just stating what i've seen, relax, not everyone sees what you see.

If they have subtitles on it says "laughter"

Do they really care? They have bigger problems in their life then trying to figure out if a show uses a laughtrac. Get a life!

Frankly, I find laugh tracks to be a distraction...I think it's up to the viewer to decide what's funny and what's not. To miss out on the laugh tracks could be a bit liberating.

That being said, if you really wanted to know where they are with captioning but no sound, I'd say look for unusual pauses in the dialogue. The actors always have to stop for at least a few seconds before their conversations can begin again

You are very observant. I never thought about that, but you are right.