Protesting for change - closed captioning edition

Hi, I’m Lauren Ash, and I am the new marketing intern here at EBO consulting! I took this job originally with the focus on building my marketing experience, but it has given me so much more than that. It has opened my eyes to the needs of the disabled community. I'm constantly learning about accessibility and how I can make an impact on my community so that it is more inclusive for everyone. And in that spirit, I am taking over this blog today to discuss something I’ve recently learned recently through a podcast by Radiolab - the origin story of closed captioning.

I’ve never thought much about closed captioning; it was just something always there on my TV whenever I watched something. I never took the time to think about where they came from or what it took to get them on my screen. That changed when I listened to the podcast The Echo in the Machine by Simon Adler, a story about identity, language, and accessibility. 

Photo credit from National Deaf Life Museum of Gallaudet students during the protest shouting and signing “Deaf President Now!”

The podcast opens with Greg Leibach, a deaf attorney from Queens, New York. He attended Gallaudet University, the only 100%  liberal arts university in the world for deaf and hard-of-hearing students. That alone had caught my attention right away.  In 1988, when a hearing president who didn’t know sign language was elected for the university, students became enraged, and I can understand why. I can’t comprehend why a president who didn’t represent the school properly would be elected. 

Greg, who at the time was the student body president, became the spokesperson for a powerful yet peaceful protest about the presidency of the university. A week after the protest, a new deaf president was elected, giving the students what they so desperately wanted: someone to properly represent them. 

Photo credit National Deaf Life Museum

That protest sparked more than a campus change; it created a movement for accessibility nationwide. By 1990, Congress passed the Decorder Act, requiring TVs to include captioning technology. It eventually led to the Telecommunications Act, ensuring that broadcast television was captioned for everyone.

Before then, watching TV without hearing meant relying on a bulky decoder box installed in your home, which was expensive and uncommon, sort of like a VCR. Listening to this made me realize how often I have assumed that things are accessible, simply because they are to me.

Photo Credit from Amberscript

The second half of this podcast dives deeply into the technical aspects of creating closed captions. I assumed that today, most of the captioning has been done by AI, but listening to this podcast, I realized that I was wrong. Up until recently, closed captioning was generated by highly trained steno writers, not just AI. By 2003, it became apparent there weren’t enough steno writers available with the amount of content out there. That's where Meredith Pither, the now president of the National Captioning Institute, came in and was tasked with experimenting with something called a Black Box, a speech recognition box. Faced with unreliable speech recognition, she began “voice writing,” echoing each word for TV into the machine. When that didn’t work, she ended up inventing her own language of code words that the software could understand. Her dedication to making technology accessible is nothing short of inspiring.

This story opened my eyes, not just to how captions came to be, but for every person who fought for access, equity, and proper representation.

Listen here to hear the whole story HERE and let us know what you learned!