Bring The Family Together With Closed Captioning

Television has been one of the main forms of entertainment inside the American home for more than thirty years, but millions of people haven't been able to enjoy it to the fullest. In the year 1985, there were 21.2 million people who suffered from some form of hearing disability, which made up 9 percent of the entire American population. These days the hearing impaired can watch some of their favorite prime time shows and all the presidential debates because of closed captioning.

There is a non profit organization set up in 1979 by the government that supplies 90% of the subtitles for TV shows. They are also responsible for the subtitles that are available on VHS tapes. We find that the percentage of closed captioned shows is approximately 12 or 13 percent, when we consider a six major station market, with each station having 18 hours of programming daily. Shows for children make up one third of all those subtitled programs.

This organization is responsible for convincing the people who run the networks to allow provide captioning for their programs. It is not as easy as it might seem. A lot of the network producers and others are just finding out what kind of a market that can be reached by using closed captioning. Upon being contacted, they admitted they had not been aware of the needs of the hearing impaired and deaf audiences.

Currently, people are sometimes resistant to providing these closed captions because the number of individuals who need this service is around one million people. This number is determined from the fact that only around 150,000 homes have the decoder that allows them to view closed captions. By the end of the year, this number is predicted to rise to 180,000.

It seems the number of programs which are captioned is influential as to the number of viewers who tune in, which in turn influences how many programs are subtitled. An hour long program will only cost around $2,000 to closed caption. This number varies because each captioning job is uniquely based on how long they have to produce the captions as well as how hard the script is.

In the case of material which has been recorded previously, a captioner needs to decide exactly how long each caption appears on the screen in order to maximize readability. Action films for obvious reasons are easier to caption. For instance, subtitling Raiders of the Lost Ark, will be much less involved than providing subtitles for A Man for All Seasons.

There are many sources of funding for closed captioning, including the Department of Education and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), private corporations, foundations and NCI. The deal might be that one party pays a third, another pays another third, and the network pays the final third. The variables affecting the problem of the size of the audience are due partly to the decoder itself as well as to public awareness. It was first introduced in 1980, and was for sale at $280. Now you can find decoders for around $200.

Grants are searched out in order to provide low income families with decoders. Various programs were launched in major cities across the country to help bring the cost of the decoder down to around $35, with the hope that future technologies might be able to inspire popular television manufacturers to offer a model with a decoder built right in, similarly to the way that stereo sound is built in to some models.

Hearing disabilities are considered the invisible disability in America. The deaf and hard of hearing may become isolated within a culture of their own primarily because they are the largest of the physically disabled groups in the country, but with a disability which is not visible. Closed captioning is such a great feature to have because it can bring together families and help them enjoy something together for a change.

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