Closed Captions History

Benefits of Closed Captioning Closed captioning allows persons with hearing disabilities to have access to television programming by displaying the audio portion of a television screen. Closed captioning provides a critical link to news, entertainment and information for individuals who are deaf or hard-of-hearing. For individuals whose native language is not English, English language captions improve comprehension and fluency. Captions also help improve literacy skills. You can turn on closed captions through your remote control or on-screen menu.

July 1993 Federal Communications commission (FCC) required all analog television receivers with screens 13 inches or larger sold or manufactured in the US to contain built-in decoder circuitry to display closed captioning.

1996 Congress required video programming distributors (cable operators, broadcasters, satellite distributors and other multi-channel video programming distributors to close caption their television programs.

July 2002 The FCC also required that digital television receivers include closed captioning display capability.

February 2014 New Rules Improved rules for TV closed captioning to ensure that viewers who are deaf and hard of hearing have full access to programming, resolving concerns on captioning quality and providing much-needed guidance to video programming distributors and programmers. The new rules apply to all television programming with captions, addressing quality standards for accuracy, synchronicity (timing), program completeness, and placement of closed captions, including the requirement that captions be:

New Rules ~Accurate: Captions must match the spoken words in the dialogue and convey background noises and other sounds to the fullest extent possible. ~Synchronous: Captions must coincide with their corresponding spoken words and sounds to the greatest extent possible and must be displayed on the screen at the speed that can be read by viewers. ~Complete: Captions must run from the beginning to the end of the program to the fullest extent possible. ~Properly placed: Captions should not block other important visual content on the screen, overlap one another of run off the edge of the video screen.

The rules distinguish between pre-recorded, live, and near-live programming and explains how the new standards apply to each type of programming, recognizing the greater hurdles involved with captioning live and near-live programing.

The Commission also adopted measures to ensure that people who are deaf and hard of hearing will have greater access to news programming in their local communities. The measures include requiring broadcasters who are permitted under the Commission’s rules to convert teleprompter script into captions to pre-scrit more of their news programming, including sports, weather, and most late-breaking stories. The pre-scripting requirement will result in captioning for some news programming that previously aired uncaptioned. In addition, the new rules required that crawls and other visual information be used to provide visual access to certain news segments that can’t be pre-scripted.