Reflecting on
the First 25 Years & Projecting the Future of TV Closed Captioning
By Cheryl Heppner
Editor: It seems hard to
believe that television captions are only 25 years old! Television was
pretty much inaccessible to people with hearing loss before that time.
Jeff Hutchins, the Chairman of the Accessible Media Industry Coalition,
provided a great review of captioning history at the 2005 TDI
convention. Cheryl Heppner of NVRC did her usual great job of capturing
his presentation.
If you want to share this
information, be sure to credit NVRC. Attribution information is at the
end of the article
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Jeff Hutchins did a solo for
the final presentation at the TDI Conference in New Orleans when his
fellow presenter, Deborah Schuster, was unable to attend due to illness.
Both Jeff and Deborah once worked together at WGBH. Jeff, who has been
involved with captioning since 1973, gave a colorful history lesson.
- We're celebrating the 25th
anniversary of closed captioning, but this isn't really accurate.
Although March 15, 1980 was the first day that individuals could buy a
caption decoder, and March 16, 1980 marked the first TV programs
broadcast with captions, a great deal of experimentation had been done
before that.
- The story begins with open
captioning. It was first applied to films in the 1950s that were made
available to deaf organizations. Dr. Malcolm Norwood of the Dept. of
Health, Education and Welfare dreamed of having captioned TV, but he had
to prove it was feasible. Dr. Norwood got the ear of WGBH, which was
proud of its history of innovation, and of a particular individual named
Phil Collier.
- In 1972, WGBH began
captioning with 26 episodes of The French Chef with Julia Child. People
called the station to ask about the captions, and when the WGBH staff
explained that it was to help people who couldn't hear the audio, the
callers would say, "Okay, that makes a lot of sense."
- The French Chef was not
really challenging to caption with the pace and the settings. A greater
challenge was to find a way to display the captions. Computers back then
were huge. WGBH decided to use a character generator that normally was
used to display the credits at the end of the show.
- With this resolved, they
decided to tackle a bigger challenge. They wanted to do something that
was almost live. In January 1973, they were able to get an advance copy
of Nixon's inauguration address from the White House and used that to
provide captions for the broadcast.
- Their next challenge was to
attempt to caption something with more than one speaker. What deaf
people said they most wanted was news, so WGBH decided to attempt
captions for ABC News Tonight.
- Julius Barnathan, the chief
of broadcasting at ABC, got behind the effort. With funding from the
Department of Education, commercials were replaced with news for and
about deaf people - weather, sports, etc. The 6:30 pm program was
rebroadcast on PBS at 11 pm, giving the WBGH crew just four hours to put
the captioning together.
- WGBH's next target was
children. They developed a multi-linguistic project in 1975 for 7 to 8
year olds to try to reach deaf children.
- In the early years, they
didn't do verbatim captions. The goal was to make captioning accessible
to all, so they rewrote captions from the 180 words per minute spoken by
newscasters to 120 words per minute.
- Julius Barnathan was
supportive of closed captioning. The Department of Education gave
funding to PBS in a 1973 contract, and engineers under John Ball started
to work on development.
- TV receivers in 1973 were
not sophisticated as they are now, so they had strict standards and had
to run interference tests on line 21, putting on data to see what would
happen.
- In 1976, WGBH went to the
Federal Communications Commission and requested the use of line 21.
Approval was granted the same year, so development of closed captioning
continued.
- Now WGBH had to figure out
how to create caption data to insert into the TV signal and recover the
data from the signal, and then have a character generator to print the
captions on the screen. The five different pieces of the puzzle took
three years to develop.
- They went to the Department
of Education for funding, but ABC said they didn't want programs
prepared by a PBS station. A new strategy was to go to Congress and ask
for funding to set up a National Captioning Institute (NCI). Mike Curzan
was hired, and he assembled the pieces of a private corporation, which
became NCI. All patents held by PBS were awarded to NCI, which opened
and began hiring in 1979 with John Ball as its head.
- NCI's first office was set
up in the DC area, and a second in Los Angeles. On March 17, after its
first program, NCI hired Jeff to develop the ability to caption live
programs. Another person hired was Carl Jensema, who is deaf.
- Encoders would only work
with pre-recorded programs. NCI sought a way to create live captioning
data. It also worked to keep the original coalition together - PBS, NCI,
Sanyo (manufacturer of the decoders), and Texas Instruments
(manufacturer of the circuits).
- It was hard to keep the
coalition because by 1982 it became obvious that the number of decoders
sold was far off the projection. In two years, only 40,000 to 50,000 had
been sold. These first decoders cost $300 and consumers felt the cost
was too high when there were so few programs to watch.
- In 1980, when the decoders
first hit the market, there were only 15 hours of captioned programs
each week. It cost $2,200 per hour to caption a program. NBC was about
ready to back off from captioning, and CBS still wasn't doing any
because it wanted to use a competing technology.
- After the first 100,000
decoders were sold, NCI took the opportunity to fix flaws that had been
identified in the earlier ones. They created new specifics and added a
remote control in 1984.
Part
Two
