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There are many laws in place to dictate the requirements of captions. These laws include the Circuitry Act of 1990, the American’s with Disabilities Act, the Telecommunications Act of 1996, and Section 508 for government requirements.

The circuitry Act of 1990 states that all TV sets manufactured for the U.S. that are 13” and larger must have a built-in decoder. Prior to this act, the deaf and hard of hearing population had to invest in an additional piece of equipment, a decoder, to activate the broadcast caption signal. The law was enacted so that all people would have access to TV programs. Since there are 20-30 million TV sets sold annually, many people are now aware of this feature on the TV remote.

Actually, there are many benefits of captions that are realized from the hearing community. I’ve heard everything from, “I turn the captions on when my children are in the room and are loud,” and “I use the captions when I’m on the telephone.” Another place that hearing people see captioned media a lot is in instances when the sound can’t be turned on or where multiple sound sources would compete, like in a bar or at a convention!

If you activate captions on your TV using your remote, you’ll notice that there are choices such as, CC1, CC2, CC3, CC4, Text 1 and Text 2. CC1 represents the primary language caption, while the others may contain another language. Text 1 and text 2 represent an area of information for emergency messages, such as tornado warnings. This remote feature activates the decoder to “open” the caption signal that is embedded on line 21 of the video signal. Thus, when a TV program or commercial is captioned, the viewer can “read” the words on the TV screen.

The American’s with Disabilities Act (ADA) prohibits discrimination based on disability in the provision of goods and services by public or private establishments or federal, state or local government agencies. Title III of the ADA requires that public facilities, such as hospitals, restaurants, shopping centers, government facilities, and museums, provide access to verbal information on TV sets.

If you are producing any educational videos, the feature of captions is crucial since the media shown in educational institutions must have captions on them. Many educational institutions will not purchase media that has no captions or subtitles featured on them.

In addition, you’ll find that many corporations will use captions on their media to accommodate their hard of hearing employees. As Laura Krochmolny, Supervising Media Producer for Lawson Products states, “In compliance with the ADA, we provide closed captions on our video programs. We believe it makes it a lot easier for the employees to grasp the full content of the video program.” Furthermore, since captions can be produced in Spanish and other foreign languages, this becomes very beneficial to use foreign language captions to communicate effectively to persons who speak English as a second language.

Anyone producing educational or corporate media, would want to offer this service to your clients and potentially add revenue to your project. More information is available at www.usdoj.gov/crt/ada.

Tax credits are available to small businesses for expenditures paid or incurred by the eligible small business to comply with applicable requirements under the American’s with Disabilities Act of 1990. For the tax form and more information on this credit visit www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/f8826.pdf.

The Telecommunications Act of 1996 requires broadcast programming to have captions for accessibility for persons who are hard of hearing or deaf. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) established rules and implementation schedules for the captioning of television programming. For example, for all new programming - January 1, 2004 to December 31, 2005 - 1350 hours of programming per channel per quarter must be captioned and January 1, 2006 and thereafter, 100% of all programming, must be captioned, with a few exemptions.

Media produced for broadcast falls under this requirement. For example, the programs we caption for WTTW, PBS, Walgreen’s programs for WGN and the Hallmark Channel require captions. When the opportunity presents itself to produce broadcast programs, you would want to consider captioning them.

For more information visit www.fcc.gov/cgb/consumerfacts/closedcaption.html.

Section 508: What is it? Section 508 is the 1998 amendment to the Rehabilitation Act. It requires Federal agencies to make their electronic and information technology accessible to people with disabilities. For example, all training and informational video and multimedia productions which support the agency's mission, regardless of format, that contain speech or other audio information necessary for the comprehension of the content, shall be open or closed captioned. For more information, visit the Section 508 Web site www.section508.gov.

As you can see, there are many legal reasons that captions serves a population far greater than just deaf viewers. In the next article, we’ll discuss more practical, economic and marketing reasons to close caption and/or subtitle your media.

Terry Thomas is President of Caption and Subtitle Services and can be reached at 866-230-1009. Her email is terry@capsubservices.com.