NEWSrelease

News from the National Captioning Institute, Inc.

Date: May 11, 2004

Contact: Jay Feinberg

703-917-7600 (V/TTY)

703-917-9853 (FAX)

jfeinberg@ncicap.org

NCI Celebrates 25 Years of Excellence

Washington, DC – Twenty-five years ago, the National Captioning Institute (NCI) was created with the mission of promoting and providing access to television programs for the deaf and hard-of-hearing through the technology of closed captioning. Established in 1979 in cooperation with ABC, NBC, PBS and the federal government as a nonprofit corporation, NCI presented the first closed-captioned television programs on March 16, 1980. For the first time ever, deaf people across America could turn on their television sets—with a caption decoder—and understand what they had been missing on television.

Fast forward to the present:

• NCI captions over 70,000 hours of prerecorded and live programming each year.
• Thousands of VHS home videos and DVDs are available with captions and subtitles.
• NCI provides accessibility for new electronic media by providing captioning and subtitling for streaming media on the Internet and CD-ROMs.
• Where thousands of deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers once enjoyed captions on prerecorded programming through decoder boxes attached to their television sets, now millions of people have access to a constant supply of news, entertainment and information using decoders built in to all new television sets since 1993.
• Captioning is a widely used tool for children learning to read and those learning English as a second language.
• By 2006, virtually 100% of new television programming will be closed captioned as mandated by the U.S. Congress.
• NCI offers a described video service to provide access to television programming and videos on DVD for people who are blind or have low vision.

In twenty-five years, a lot has happened and some might say, “Mission accomplished.” Indeed, NCI is extremely proud of its history, of the phenomenal growth and diversification of this vital service, and of the innumerable individuals and corporations that have made this success possible.

But there is much more to be done. “While NCI has accomplished what it was originally created to do, we now face new challenges, and we embrace those challenges with great enthusiasm,” said NCI Chairman and CEO Gene Chao. “New technologies and media will continue to drive us to develop and implement resources to ensure that deaf and hard of hearing people—and others who are limited in their ability to participate fully in the world of communications—have access to audio and visual media of all types.”

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