Movies And Television Programs Are Much More Appreciated By Today's Hearing Impaired
Although a large number of us have been enjoying the evolution of television for
more than thirty years, there are millions of Americans who, until recently, have been missing out on all the amazing advances that TV has brought into our homes. Consider this bit of information from the National Center for Health Statistics - in 1985, 21.2 million Americans were deaf or hearing impaired, about 9 percent of the total population. These days the hearing impaired can watch some of their favorite prime time shows and all the presidential debates because of closed captioning.
Ninety percent of all captioning, or subtitles, is provided for television programs by a non-profit organization that was established by the federal government back in 1979. This organization also provides the subtitles for thousands of movie videotapes that are available. In a survey conducted over eighteen hours and across six television stations, around 13% of all programming provided closed captioning. Children's shows comprise about one third of these closed captions.
One of the biggest tasks that this organization must perform is to convince a show's producers, programmers and network executives that a show should be closed captioned. Easier said than done in some cases. The market that will become viewers as a result of closed captioning, is something that network producers, are only now beginning to understand. They didn't really take this population into consideration when they were designing their programs.
Some of them expressed reluctance at this time to caption their programs because the current estimate for a close captioned audience is close to one million people. Those numbers have been based on the information from the decoder, which makes it possible for people in 150,000 homes to see the captioning. By the end of the year, this number is predicted to rise to 180,000.
Experts called this situation a kind of "chicken and egg" type deal in that the number of programs being offered with closed captioning was influenced greatly by the number of viewers with decoders. One problem is that it costs anywhere from $1,500 to $2,2000 to add captioning to a program that lasts an hour. Other variables that affect the total cost include how much time producers have to add the captions as well as the difficulty of the program's script.
If the material is pre-recorded, the timing of the caption must be perfect as well as how long the words should appear on the screen. Closed captioning is a quicker process when we are working with action movies. 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. A deal may be struck which will call for the network to pay a third of the cost, you pay a third of the cost, and we will, then, pay a third of the cost. The issue with the size of the viewership is partly due to the decoder, and partly due to lack of public awareness. When decoders were first introduced in 1980, they cost $280. The cost of a decoder is now less than $250, usually around $200.
Grants are searched out in order to provide low income families with decoders. There are programs in some major cities that allow decoders to be provided to lower income families for as little as $35, it is a hope that at some point in the future decoders will be inbuilt to TV's, this will happen when the technology becomes cheap enough.
The invisible disability of hearing loss is one shared by many Americans. 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.
by: Ava Robinson.
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Movies And Television Programs Are Much More Appreciated By Today's Hearing Impaired Anaheim