Timeline of closed-captioning milestones

Editor: Captioned television has been a boon for people with hearing loss. Here's a list of milestones and important dates in the development of this great service.

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- 1970: The National Bureau of Standards investigates using a portion of the network television signal to send information on a nationwide basis. The project didn't work, but ABC suggested that it might be possible to send captions instead.

- 1971: The First National Conference on Television for the Hearing Impaired in Nashville, Tenn., demonstrates a preview of closed captioning.

- Feb. 15, 1972: ABC and the National Bureau of Standards present closed captions embedded within the normal broadcast of "Mod Squad" at Gallaudet College (now Gallaudet University).

- 1972: Open captioning begins on PBS' "The French Chef," becoming the first television program ac-cessible to deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers. "ABC News" is rebroadcast five hours later on PBS with open cap-tions. "Zoom" and "Once Upon a Classic" follow suit.

- 1973: The "Captioned ABC News" is produced as the only timely newscast accessible to deaf and hard-of-hearing people.

- 1976: The FCC adopts the line 21 of the vertical blanking interval (VBI) to be used for the transmis-sion of closed captioning. FCC requires television licensees to transmit emergency messages in a visual format.

- 1979: National Captioning Institute is created.

- March 16, 1980: The first closed-captioned television series are broadcast for those with caption de-coders. They include "The ABC Sunday Night Movie," "The Wonderful World of Disney" and "Masterpiece Thea-ter."

- 1982: Real-time captioning debuts.

- 1990: Television Decoder Circuitry Act of 1990 is passed, requiring all television receivers with screens of 13 inches or larger be capable of receiving and displaying captions by 1993. The Americans With Dis-abilities Act of 1990 is enacted, requiring all federally-funded public service announcements to be closed-captioned.

- 1992: FCC adopts technical standards for closed captioning on cable systems.

- 1993: Requirements from Television Decoder Circuitry Act of 1990 take effect.

- 1996: Telecommunications Act of 1996 adds Section 713 to the Communications Act - requiring the FCC to prescribe rules and implementation schedules for closed captioning of television video programs.

- 1997: The FCC adopts rules that gradually increase the amount of programming requiring closed captioning.

- 2000: The FCC requires an increasing amount of digital television programming to be captioned and establishes a phase-in schedule for closed captioning of digital programming.

- 2006: 100 percent of all new video programming, with some exceptions, must be closed-captioned on both digital and analog televisions (new analog programming is programming first aired on/after Jan. 1, 1998; new digital programming is programming first aired on/after July 1, 2002).

- 2008: 75 percent of all pre-rule programming (analog programs first aired before Jan. 1, 1998, and digital programs first aired before July 1, 2002) must be captioned.

- 2010: 100 percent of all new analog and digital Spanish language programs, with some exceptions, must be closed-captioned.

- 2012: 75 percent of all pre-rule Spanish-language video programming must be captioned.