The story of captioning as a service for people who are deaf or hard of hearing began on August 5, 1972, when Julia Child, The French Chef, taught viewers to make a special chicken recipe. This broadcast from WGBH studios in Boston has been immortalized not because of the exquisite entrée, but because of its significance to communication. The French Chef provided Americans who are deaf and hard of hearing their first opportunity to enjoy the audio portion of a national television program through the use of open captions.
The Public Broadcasting System (PBS), with federal funding, took the lead in captioning broadcast programming in the 1970s. The Caption Center, a service of WGBH Boston, captioned programs such as The Captioned ABC News, a late-night rebroadcast carried by more than 190 PBS stations, and Zoom, a children's series.
The first demonstration of closed captioning took place in 1971 at the National Conference on Television for the Hearing Impaired in Nashville, Tennessee. Successful testing prompted the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to set aside line 21 for the transmission of closed captions in 1976. PBS and the Caption Center received federal funding to develop caption-editing consoles that would be used to caption prerecorded programs, encoding equipment that broadcasters and others would use to add captions to their programs, and prototype decoders.
On March 16, 1980, the National Captioning Institute broadcast the first closed captioned television series. Programs such as The ABC Sunday Night Movie, The Wonderful World of Disney, and Masterpiece Theater whetted the appetites of audience members for more captioned television. IBM became the first company to closed caption its commercials. The following year, closed captions spread to home videos. In 1982, realtime captioning hit the scene during live broadcasts of the Sugar Bowl and the Academy Awards. Early captioning efforts were laborious and costly because there were few commercial tools available for captioning.
Two laws significantly impacted the spread of captioning. The Television Decoder Circuitry Act of 1990 mandated that by mid-1993 all new television sets 13 inches or larger manufactured for sale in the U.S. must contain caption decoding technology. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 required that "video programming first published or exhibited after the effective date of such regulations is fully accessible through the provision of closed captions." The 1996 Act empowered the FCC to interpret and enforce it. The FCC mandated an eight-year phase-in starting on January 1, 1998, for captioning of "new" programming (programs that air for the first time after the ruling takes effect). By January 1, 2006, 95 percent of all new television programming must be captioned. The FCC did not create a phase-in for "old" programming, but required that by January 1, 2006, 75 percent of programming that originally aired before the Act must be captioned.
Developments in technology have both facilitated captioning and challenged it to grow in new directions. The Caption Center collaborated with Microsoft to make the CD-ROM encyclopedia Encarta 98 accessible in 1997. The Caption Center also developed a software utility that allows realtime staff to send simultaneous data streams for closed captioning and web site URLs for the benefit of WebTV users. Many captioning companies are working hard to ensure that Digital Television has high-quality captioning.
In a relatively short period of time, the demand for captioning has driven its availability from a few television programs to a ubiquitous service in various media. Captioning is now provided for movies, television programs, videos, musical and theater performances, lectures, government proceedings, planetarium shows, meetings and conferences. The demand for captioned programming of all kinds should drive science centers and museums to utilize this service to tap into the responsive and powerful market of visitors who are hard of hearing or deaf.
