captioning
Captioning is the process of displaying a transcription of the audio portion of a program on a television, video screen, or other visual display. There are two types of captioning: open captioning, which is visible to all viewers because it is hard-coded into the program; and closed captioning, which has embedded coding that a viewer must activate in order to see the captions. Developed with the needs of the deaf community in mind, captioning first began in television broadcasts and has since spread to other media and venues.
History in Television
In 1970 a failed experiment in sending precise time information via the portion of a television signal that did not carry picture information was launched by the National Bureau of Standards (now the National Institute of Standards and Technology) and the American Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) and led to another idea: Would it be possible to send captions encoded in a television signal?
A year later, at the First National Conference on Television for the Hearing Impaired in Nashville, Tennessee, two possible technologies for captioning television programs made their debuts. However, both technologies available in 1971 required specially equipped television sets for deaf viewers. By 1972, when the National Bureau of Standards and ABC presented captioning technologies at Gallaudet University, they had managed to embed closed captions within the normal broadcast of The Mod Squad. Encouraged by enthusiastic responses from the deaf community and by their initial successes, the National Association of Broadcasters began considering how they might move forward with true captioning service, and the federal government provided funds for research and development. Thus, in 1973, the engineering department of the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) began work on the project under a contract with the Bureau of Education for the Handicapped of the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (now the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services).
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While closed captioning service was still under development, PBS began using open captioning in 1972 when it captioned The French Chef and made television history. ABC also utilized open captioning by rebroadcasting its national news on PBS five hours after the original broadcast had aired on ABC. When The Captioned ABC News began airing in 1973, it was the only newscast made accessible to the deaf community through the technology of captioning, and it would remain so for almost a decade.
Successful tests of closed captioning conducted in 1973 by Washington, D.C., PBS channel WETA led the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in 1976 to reserve line 21 for the transmission of closed captions across the United States. PBS engineers then worked with the FCC’s approval to develop caption editing consoles, encoding equipment, and prototype decoders. In the final stages of development at PBS, those working on the captioning project realized that designating a single, nonprofit organization to work with commercial television networks and oversee the dissemination of captioning technology would be advantageous, and in 1979 the National Captioning Institute (NCI) was founded to promote and provide access to television programs for the deaf community through closed captioning technology. March 16, 1980, marked the advent of regularly scheduled closed captioning television in the United States.
Although viewing captions still required a separate closed caption decoder in 1980, a decade later a partnership between NCI and ITT Corporation would lead to the development of the first caption-decoding microchip. This innovation could be incorporated into television units themselves making separate caption-decoding boxes unnecessary, and in 1990 the Television Decoder Circuitry Act mandated that all new television sets with a 13-inch screen or larger manufactured for sale in the United States contain caption-decoding technology. In the same year, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) required that public facilities provide access to verbal information on television, films, or slide shows. Captioning, of course, made this possible.
Two additional pieces of legislation have further ensured the dissemination of captioning technologies and the future of accessibility for deaf viewers. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 required that digital television receivers contain caption-decoding technology, and the Twenty-First Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act of 2010 mandated that broadcasters provide captioning for television programs redistributed via the Internet and for HDTV decoding boxes to include technology that controls captioning.
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In addition, the FCC has also issued recent regulations that further expand the use of closed captioning and ensure quality captioning services are provided for viewers and consumers. In early 2012, the FCC adopted rules outlining closed captioning requirements for programming delivered through the Internet. Then in February 2014, the FCC released a set of new rules for television closed captioning that address quality standards for accuracy, synchronicity, program completeness, and the placement of closed captions on the screen.
Internet
The Twenty-First Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act, passed in 2010, expanded the scope of captioning beyond the world of television to the Internet. Originally focused on ensuring that programs originally shown and captioned on television retain captioning services when made available on the Internet, requiring captioning of online programming appears to have spurred the use of captioning in other online video streaming situations as well. Multiple pieces of software and online tutorials exist for the captioning of YouTube videos in addition to instructions for turning the closed captioning feature in YouTube off and on. However, for those who might not want to undertake captioning their own video materials, YouTube announced a “YouTube Ready” designation for professional caption vendors in the United States in June 2010. The companies on the list released passed a caption quality evaluation, have a website and YouTube channel where customers can learn more about their services, and have agreed to post rates for the variety of services they offer for YouTube content. Popular video software such as Flash, Silverlight Media Framework, Windows Media Video, and QuickTime all include closed captioning functions as well as make viewing and producing videos with captions possible for Internet users.
In addition to the use of captioning in online streaming video, a number of corporations, including Adobe Systems, Deque Systems, IBM Corporation, Hewlett-Packard Development Company, and the U.S. Department of Education, have partnered in developing and supporting the Web Accessibility Initiative, which sets guidelines for making websites accessible including providing captioning for all audio information. Not only has this consortium developed guidelines and means of evaluating the accessibility of websites, but their own website also serves as a space for sharing successful techniques and failures in utilizing a variety of software and technologies to support accessibility.
Movie Theaters
Although legislation governing closed captioning in television applies when movies are aired on television and the ADA essentially made the use of captioning in public places mandatory, accessing captioning at movie theaters has continued to be problematic. Large, national theater chains such as AMC Theatres and Regal Cinemas offer open captioning at select showings and in select theaters. However, new technologies may offer more choice to individuals wishing to view movies with captioning in the theater. Some of AMC’s theaters are equipped with Rear Window Captioning units developed by the National Center for Accessible Media, which send captions to a device that guests can borrow from the theater and that fit in the seat’s cup holder. Some Regal Cinemas now make Sony Entertainment Access Glasses available to customers wishing to utilize captions. The glasses, which are heavier than those used for 3D movies but about the same size, use projection technology to make captions visible only to the individual wearing them. In addition, Captionfish.com and the Captionfish app for smartphones has made it much easier to locate theaters that are hosting open captioned movies or that make captioning technologies available.
Movies for Home Viewing
Although producers of audiovisual materials such as DVDs and Blu-ray discs are typically not required to caption their products, most opt to do so. Closed captioning can typically be accessed through the main menu under the disc set-up. It is common to see SDHH (Subtitled for the Deaf/Hard of Hearing) or the equivalent listed along with subtitles in Spanish and French as video menu options.
Airplanes
Despite regulations for captioning in television and coding that makes captioning available on home DVDs and Blu-ray discs, individuals who are deaf have a difficult time accessing captioning services when flying. Although commercial airlines must provide captions in their safety videos, they have not been required to ensure access to in-flight entertainment, making accessibility inconsistent and difficult. Captioning can usually be accessed on airlines that offer individual screens and DirecTV, but passengers must know how to utilize DirecTV to access captioning services. International flights sometimes provide English subtitles for foreign movies, but, again, the lack of consistency in such offerings makes access difficult.
Sport Venues
As technology becomes more advanced and organizations strive to meet both the spirit and the letter of laws such as the ADA, an increasing number of public venues such as sporting arenas are working to offer captioning. For example, in 2013 the National Football League’s (NFL’s) Seattle Seahawks announced the addition of captioning at their home games at CenturyLink Field (now Lumen Field). The organization placed screens for captioning in the corners of each end zone so that public address announcements could be displayed as text in these locations. The NFL and the Seattle Seahawks are not the only entities attempting to provide captioning services in their arenas, however. Several National Basketball Association (NBA), Major League Baseball (MLB), National Hockey League (NHL), and Major League Soccer (MLS) teams and venues have provided means of displaying captioning during their games as well.
Radio
Another frontier in captioning technology is the collaborative work of National Public Radio (NPR), WGBH’s National Center for Accessible Media, Harris Corporation, and Towson University’s School of Emerging Technology; they have been developing means for captioning radio programming. Funded by a U.S. Department of Education grant in 2006, the collaborative made it possible to first offer captioning of NPR’s 2008 presidential election coverage. Using a method termed voice writing, individuals working in a captioning center use voice recognition software and editing tools to translate radio programming into captioned transcripts made available on program providers’ websites. In 2013 Latino USA became the first nationally syndicated public radio series to offer live captioning.
The original version of this article was published by SAGE Publications in The SAGE Deaf Studies Encyclopedia.