Captioning

History in Television

In 1970, a failed experiment in sending precise time information via the portion of a television signal that did not carry picture information was launched by the National Bureau of Standards (now the National Institute of Standards and Technology) and the American Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) and led to another idea: Would it be possible to send captions encoded in a television signal?

A year later, at the First National Conference on Television for the Hearing Impaired in Nashville, Tennessee, two possible technologies for captioning television programs made their debuts. However, both technologies available in 1971 required specially equipped television sets for deaf viewers. By 1972, when the National Bureau of Standards and ABC presented captioning technologies at Gallaudet University, they had managed to embed closed captions within the normal broadcast of The Mod Squad. Encouraged by enthusiastic responses from the deaf community and by their initial successes, the National Association of Broadcasters began considering how they might move forward with true captioning service, and the federal government provided funds for research and development. Thus, in 1973, the engineering department of the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) began work on the project under a contract with the Bureau of Education for the Handicapped of the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (now the U.S. Department of Healthand Human Services).

TV Captioning News With Peter Jennings

Source: Gallaudet University Archives

While closed captioning service was still under development, PBS began using open captioning in 1972 when it captioned The French Chef and made television history. ABC also utilized open captioning by rebroadcasting its national news on PBS five hours after the original broadcast had aired on ABC. When The Captioned ABC News began airing in 1973, it was the only newscast made accessible to the deaf community through the technology of captioning, and it would remain so for almost a decade.

[Page 100]Successful tests of closed captioning conducted in 1973 by Washington, D.C., PBS channel WETA led the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in 1976 to reserve line 21 for the transmission of closed captions across the United States. PBS engineers then worked with the FCC’s approval to develop caption editing consoles, encoding equipment, and prototype decoders. In the final stages of development at PBS, those working on the captioning project realized that designating a single, nonprofit organization to work with commercial television networks and oversee the dissemination of captioning technology would be advantageous, and in 1979, the National Captioning Institute (NCI) was founded to promote and provide access to television programs for the deaf community through closed captioning technology. March 16, 1980, marked the advent of regularly scheduled closed captioning television in the United States.

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