“The networks felt the deaf population was too small to justify funding of captions, while the deaf community viewed captions as a right, not a privilege,” says Philip Bravin, who was CEO of the non-profit National Captioning Institute (NCI) in the mid-1990s and chair of the National Association of the Deaf’s TV Access Committee in the early 1980s.īy the 1970s, however, advocacy efforts led to early experimentation with TV closed captioning. There was no system in place to provide captions, and finding a solution was not a priority for many in the TV business. As television grew, however, it did not follow suit. Silent films were accessible to those who could not hear, but “talkies” left deaf people “effectively isolated from the world of films.” Captioned versions of Hollywood films for deaf people only started to become required under law in 1958. Lang, now professor emeritus at Rochester Institute of Technology, notes that visual entertainment wasn’t always out of reach for deaf people. But getting there was a fight, and that battle still continues today. Starting with The ABC Sunday Night Movie, Disney’s Wonderful World and Masterpiece Theatre, a new world opened up. It wasn’t until Ma40 years ago this Monday - that the network TV channels ABC, NBC and PBS debuted closed-captioned television shows, in which the show’s dialogue and soundtrack appeared as text on screen as the action proceeded.
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