I'm hearing impaired so I always keep closed caption on.
While I was watching Judge Joe Brown in Comcast HD Channel 232 (WTWC HD; known as NBC HD -- although not all shows in NBC are high definition), I heard National Weather Service who issued a flood advisory by a telephone-quality voice
uhh: I hate it...why can't they just speak clearly through a microphone instead of telephone?). Know what? They didn't provide scrolling subtitles for those who are deaf, so by other means, I grabbed my BlackBerry 7290 and launched WeatherBug, a program that gives me weather information in my BlackBerry. I checked the Weather Alerts, but provided little information but only mentioned Flood Advisory Warning.
How do I get the message from National Weather Service? The normal TV sound gets cut off, then we hear the long, high-pitched sound. Next, a telephone quality voice begans to speak. After it finished, we hear three medium-pitched beeps, and the sound from the show that I am watching returns to normal. As I said, there's no subtitle in effect from the speech from National Weather Service.
So, my mom and I can barely (maybe almost) understand the telephone quality voice from National Weather Service, but my mom aren't hearing impaired, as my mom can understand the voice a bit better than I can, but not quite, so closed caption are always benifical to us, but for mom, it's not always required for her.