Black Bars, White Text

It used to be a black box that sat on top of our television.

My parents paid a modest deposit to lease the box indefinitely from our local telecom company, occasionally returning it for repairs or exchanging it for an upgraded model when one was available. My childhood was filled with hours spent obsessively flipping through the television channels to find a program that picked up decoded signals from the box that then were transmitted on screen in black bars with white text. It was these words that opened up new worlds for me— worlds of dialogue, news, and sometimes even music—allowing me to improve my English comprehension and train myself to recognize how words sounded, especially words that I had only ever encountered through reading.

These black bars with white text gave me access to the hearing world.

Access to spaces that I, like many deaf people, were often barred from, because we were told it was too costly or technologically impossible to provide on a regular basis. Yet this access—closed captioning—was, and is, essential for our mental and social wellbeing.

Captions are words displayed on screen that provide the speech or sound portion of a program’s audio. With this access, deaf people can better comprehend speech and retain information longer while improving reading literacy. Studies have also demonstrated that captions assist language comprehension and retention in people whose first language is not English, and as Sean Zdenek explains in Reading Sounds, even people who have difficulty processing sensory or speech information have reportedly found benefits from closed captioning.¹ Moreover, captions provide deaf people with the ability to communicate more freely with their hearing peers, as they’ll have access to the same social references—such as the plot of a popular television show, or song lyrics displayed for a music video.² Captioning thus presents a sociological breakthrough for deaf people.

Though the history of closed captioning has largely been framed as a history of legislative changes for accessibility and technological progress that turned captioning decoder set-top boxes into decoder chips, it is also a social history.

Captioning emerged out of protest.

It began with Cuban-American silent film actor Emerson Romero (1900–1972), who performed under the screen name Tommy Albert during the 1920s and was one of five deaf actors working in the industry.³ As was typical in small production companies, Romero also edited the film reels, wrote and corrected scripts, and wrote the intertitles—the dialogue or information text shown in between scenes. The introduction of “talkies” ended his acting career and made intertitles redundant. By 1947, guided by his experiences at the production company and responding to the deaf community’s request for accessibility in film, Romero began creating a captioned library by purchasing various titles and splicing subtitles between picture frames. He rented out the captioned films to deaf schools and clubs. Although his method was the first technique for captioning films, it was widely considered unsatisfactory, if not crude: it interrupted the flow of film and dialogue, damaged the soundtrack, and significantly extended the viewing length. Lacking funds and support from the film industry, Romero eventually abandoned this work.

Romero’s technique did catch the attention of Edmund Burke Boatner (1903–1983), superintendent of the American School for the Deaf, who founded the non-profit Captioned Films for the Deaf company (CFD) with C. D. O’Connor. CFD adapted a Belgium company’s development of etching in films (printing captions directly on the master film copy) and distributed captioned films to deaf communities; from 1947 to 1958, the non-profit captioned and distributed 29 educational and Hollywood films on its own. In 1958, U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed Public Law 85–905, which provided CFD with federal funding and support from the U.S. Department of Education. By 1979, the National Captioning Institute would expand the work of CFD to promote and provide access to television programs on ABC, NBC, and PBS. The work was time-consuming and expensive, however, as it could take up to 40 hours a week to caption one...