Closed Captioning Provides Major Breakthrough For Hard Of Hearing
Television has provided information, excitement and entertainment to American families
for over thirty years, but for many people, the sounds of the television simply could not be heard.
The National Center for Health Statistics has stated that 21.2 million people suffered from hearing loss in 1985 - almost 10% of the entire population of the US.
Today these 21.2 million people are able to enjoy almost half of all prime time programming as well as talk shows and even presidential debates.
One organization is responsible for providing 90 percent of the closed captioning for the shows we see on TV, and it is a non-profit organization that has been around since 1979. Thousands of videotaped movies, also have subtitles thanks to this agency.
Look at it this way - if you are talking about six stations that run 18 hours of programming a day, around 13 percent of these programs offer closed captioning. Shows for children make up one third of all those subtitled programs.
This government organization works with network execs, programmers and TV producers to provide closed captioning for their programming. You may think this would be easy, but it isn't.
The market that can be reached through closed captioning is new enough that many producers and other network executives are just now becoming aware of it. They didn't really take this population into consideration when they were designing their programs.
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 estimation is based on the fact that the number of decoders, which allow the captions to be viewed, are in some 150,000 households. However, they expect that number to rise by some 30,000 by the end of the year.
We refer to this as the chicken or the egg dilemma, as in which comes first, since it's the number of captioned programs that influences the viewer numbers, which in turn affect how many programs are captioned.
One problem is that it costs anywhere from $1,500 to $2,2000 to add captioning to a program that lasts an hour. Also influencing the cost are such variables as how long it takes to produce those captions as well as how difficult the script is.
Other decisions must be made as well, such as when a caption should appear on the screen and what length of time will be needed for viewers to read it.
Films which include long action sequences are easier to caption, generally. For instance, subtitling Raiders of the Lost Ark, will be much less involved than providing subtitles for A Man for All Seasons.
The Public Broadcasting Service, the Department of Education, and other businesses, provide the necessary funding for certain shows while foundations and NCI fund other programs. The costs are usually split, for example we will pay one third, while the network pays a third, and you pay the remaining third.
Part of the problem in achieving the needed audience size is public awareness, as well as part of it being the decoder. The device cost around $280 when it first arrived in 1980. The cost of a decoder is now less than $250, usually around $200.
There are grants available from certain foundations and corporations that are aiming to help low income deaf people get decoders for their homes. In larger cities, there are programs that allow people to buy a decoder for as little as $35.
Hopefully one day technology will advance to the point of allowing television manufacturers providing decoders in at least one model of television, so that all the hearing impaired would have to do is buy that model of television.
The invisible disability of hearing loss is one shared by many Americans. Those who are hearing impaired are the most prominent group of disabled citizens within the US, but because this issue is not as obvious as others, they tend to become isolated.
By providing the deaf and hard of hearing with the ability to enjoy what everyone else in the room is watching, closed captions really do help the whole family to come together.
by: John Chambers
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