Captioning Technology, Media

Emergence of Technology

In 1960, Pilgrim Imaging was the first to begin displaying open captioning for the deaf for the Captioned Films for the Deaf Program under the sponsorship of the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (now the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services). In 1970, the National Bureau of Standards (now the National Institute of Standards and Technology) and the American Broadcast Corporation (ABC) launched an experiment designed to encode information on the bottom of televisions screens. [Page 103]Although the project was unsuccessful, it paved the way for the advent of captioned media. One year later, new captioning technologies were introduced at the First National Conference on Television for the Hearing Impaired. Those technologies were dependent on special equipment. Gallaudet College also joined the battle to bring captioning to the deaf. On February 15, 1972, ABC succeeded in airing a broadcast of The Mod Squad with embedded closed captions. The federal government began testing captioning technologies.

A cooking show ultimately became the first television show in American history to provide captioning for the deaf. The French Chef appeared on WGBH Boston on August 5, 1972. Other programs followed, including ABC World News Tonight, Zoom, and Once Upon a Classic. In 1973, ABC was the first broadcast channel to provide a captioned version of its prerecorded news programs for viewing on the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) within five hours of the original broadcast. The Captioned ABC News was the only news show for a decade that provided this service. Within three years, ABC had introduced caption-editing television consoles.

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