Here’s to Closed Captioning!

      It’s a British spy thriller and a key moment in episode 6 of season 1. We’re just about to find out who’s responsible for kidnapping the innocent student and all the violence that ensued.

      But they’re all speaking with impenetrable Brit accents. Some are East Enders, Cockneys. Others are from the midlands, heavy Yorkshire brogues. Most important, we don’t hear nearly as well as we used to and the accents make it harder. So, how the hell are we supposed to understand what they are saying as they finally explain the TV series’ convoluted plot?

      Not too much of a problem, actually. We read the closed captioning.

      We began using closed captioning all the time six or seven years ago, a little after the period when we became increasingly conscious that our hearing had been deteriorating. Too many times we’d be saying, “What?” when someone was speaking from the other room or mumbled just a bit or didn’t speak loudly enough. Too many times we’d ask others to repeat what they had just said. Because we didn’t quite catch it all.

      Like many people we know, my wife had gotten hearing aids. I should get them, too, and I keep telling her that I will, soon, because I know I should. The hearing aids helped her, but not enough when the TV was on and the actors spoke quickly and sometimes had those accents. For me, it was even worse, catching a bit of dialogue here, a fragment of a speech there. And that was even without accents unfamiliar to our ears.

      So, we permanently switched on the closed captioning (it’s called closed because they can be turned on or off by the viewer, unlike "open" captions which are permanently burned into the video). 

      We thought we were the only ones to use it. But every time we mentioned our use of closed captioning to friends, some who wear hearing aids and many who don’t, they’d say, of course, they do it, too. Turns out, just about everyone we know who is around our age does it.

      And it’s not just those of us who are hard of hearing apparently. According to recent studies, young people also like the captions, with most young adults between 18–25 using them at least part of the time, according to a Guardian article. A 2023 YouGov survey noted that more than a third of young adults prefer watching videos with subtitles, citing improved comprehension and understanding of accents as key reasons.

      So, on behalf of several demographic cohorts, I’d like to thank whoever invented this life-changing concept. But it’s not exactly clear who that was.  

      In 1929, when the film industry began producing talkies, Emerson Romero, an American deaf actor who had made most of his living as a Charlie Chaplin impersonator, realized his services would no longer be in demand. Talkies meant an end to subtitles and an end to deaf people having an equal film experience.

      Romero started to experiment with ways to create captions for films by slicing film strips and adding caption images between frames, turning talkies into captioned silent films. He is credited with creating the first captioned film in 1947. 

      But his method wasn’t adopted by the industry, which was less enthused with the idea of providing a transcript of sorts to accompany a film. His work, however, did get the attention of American School for the Deaf superintendent Edmund Burke Boatner, who would expand on his ideas and gain government support for the idea in the process.

      Meanwhile in Britain, Alan Newell, a University of Southhampton professor, had been developing closed caption production system prototypes for the BBC. And in Canada, the National Broadcasting Service was developing a system that placed a hidden time code on an unused part of the television signal, a technology that provided the basis for closed captioning.

      Finally, Malcolm J. Norwood, the director of the Captioned Films for the Deaf program, helped found the National Captioning Institute, which was dedicated to providing access to television programs for the deaf and hard-of-hearing. Norwood played a crucial role in the Line 21 Initiative, which reserved the 21st line on a television screen for captions.

      Ultimately, all that led to the first captioned television show, in the history of closed captioning, Julia Child’s “The French Chef,” in 1972. 

      So, thank you all. And by the way, the British spy agency, MI5, was ultimately responsible at least in part for the kidnapping, which turned out to be a false flag operation. Or at least that’s what I gleaned from the captions.