THE BENEFITS OF CLOSED CAPTIONING

Closed captioning was developed to aid hearing-impaired people, but it is also useful for different people in a variety of situations:

• Closed captioning is a service to deaf people and people with hearing disabilities. They can enjoy watching television while reading the captions on the screen.
• Even if one’s hearing is perfectly normal, using closed captioning can be very useful in a noisy environment to make sure that one isn’t missing any dialogue.
• Closed captioning is very handy if you are learning a new language.
• Closed captioning also improves literacy skills.
• Heavily accented speech is more easily understood.
• Unlike subtitled movies, closed captioning allows the viewer to choose whether or not to display the captions.

Closed captions (text versions of the spoken dialogue of a television, movie, or computer presentation) are encoded and can only be activated (seen by the viewer) by using caption decoders that are built into newer television sets, but are also available separately.

There has been a delay in applying closed captioning to digital media (such as HD television) and this is making television programs less accessible to people with hearing disabilities. This is because closed captioning for high definition broadcasts is technologically challenging.