History of Closed Captioning

1970 – The National Bureau of Standards and ABC experiment with digitally encoding precise time information into a portion of the television signal. The experiment fails, but it inspires an idea to send captions enclosed in the television signal.

1971 – At the first National Conference on Television for the Hearing Impaired, two possible technologies for captioning television programs debut. Both display captions only on specially equipped TV sets.

1972 – On February 15, an exciting demonstration occurs at Gallaudet College (now University.) With the use of a specially equipped TV set, The National Bureau of standards presents closed captions embedded within the normal broadcast of “The Mod Squad,” proving the viability of closed captioning. Nonetheless, closed captioning is still in its early experimental stage.

1972 – “The French Chef” with Julia Child was the first open captioned program to air, meaning that the captions appear to everyone watching and cannot be turned off.

1973 – ABC begins rebroadcasting “World News Tonight,” also with open captions 5 hours after it originally airs. It is the only timely newscast accessible to the deaf and hard of hearing audience.

1973 – The federal government funds further development and testing of closed captioning, meaning captions could be turned on and off. The engineering department of the Public Broadcast System starts the project under contact to the Bureau of Education for the Handicapped of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare.

1973 – WETA in Washington, D.C. successfully tests the closed captioning system using line 21 of the television signal.

1976 – The FCC reserves line 21 of the television signal for the transmission of closed captions. With the FCC’s approval, PBS engineers innovate the caption editing consoles that would be used to caption prerecorded programs, the encoding equipment that broadcasters would use to add captions to their programs, and prototype decoders.

1979 – PBS realized that securing the cooperation of commercial television networks requires a nonprofit, single-purpose organization with a specific mission to perform the captioning. Hence, the Department of Health, Education and Welfare inaugurated the National Captioning Institute (NCI). NCI’s mandate is to promote and provide access to television programs for the deaf and hard-of-hearing audience through closed captioning technology.

1980 – On March 16, NCI breaks through the barriers of silence with the first closed captioned prerecorded television programs, “The Wonderful World of Disney,” The ABC Sunday Night Movie,” and “Masterpiece Theatre.” A decoder box is needed to view the captions. Decoders are sold by Sears for $250.

1982 – NCI provides the first real-time captioning for a live event, the Academy Awards. A court reporter trained as a captioner provides the captions using a Stenotype machine, which uses phonetic codes and allows the captioner to take down the spoken word at speeds of up to 250 words per minute. The ad-libs and the awarding of the Oscars are live captioned by the steno captioner, while a production coordinator displays the prepared captions of the scripted portions of the broadcast. Later that year, “World News Tonight” is the first regularly-scheduled program to be real-time captioned.

1984-1990 –Many more prerecorded and live programs are captioned, including prime time series, movies, home videos, other nightly newscasts, morning news programs, political debates, and a myriad of sporting events, including the Super Bowl and the Olympics.

1989 – NCI partners with ITT to develop the first caption-decoding microchip to be built directly into new television sets in the factory.

1990 – The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) is passed. The ADA prohibits discrimination against persons with disabilities in employment, state and local government services.

1996 – The Telecommunications Act is passed. It requires that digital television receivers also contain caption-decoding technology.

2009 – NCI invents DSMM technology to virtually eliminate modem drops.

2010 – The Twenty-First Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act requires broadcasters to provide captioning for television programs redistributed on the web and for HDTV-decoding boxes to include a button that controls closed captioning in the output signal.

2012 – The FCC adopts rules establishing closed captioning requirements for programming delivered through the internet. Due to this legislation, closed captioning access is built into consumer electronics at a level that guarantees its universality.

2019 – NCI expands accessibility in small local markets by offering CaptionSentry, its state-of-the art ASR solution.