Malcolm and the DOE brought together a team in 1971 which included the National Bureau of Standards, the National Association of Broadcasters, ABC, and PBS. The FCC agreed in principle with the issues raised, and in response issued Public Notice 70-1328 in December 1970. He was the perfect leader to champion this new technology and he accepted the challenge. Today he is often called the Father of Closed Captioning within the community.
He had been working in the Captioned Films for the Deaf department since 1960. It was at this time that deaf bureaucrat Malcolm Norwood from the Department of Education (then HEW) enters the story. This request came at a perfect point in time when the technology was ready, and the various parties were interested and prepared to take on the challenge. In April 1970, the FCC received a petition asking that emergency alerts be accompanied by text for deaf viewers. In the United States, there was interest brewing in closed captioning systems by the end of the 1960s.
NorwoodĪs television grew in popularity, there were some attempts at optical subtitles in the early years, but these were not wildly successful nor widely adopted. But there were no subtitles for local audiences - no doubt to the irritation of deaf and hard-of-hearing patrons who had been equally enjoying the movies alongside hearing persons for years. But translations for foreign audiences were still desired, and various time-consuming optical and chemical processes were used to generate the kind of subtitles we think of today. Now there was no need for intertitles since you could hear the dialogue.
This changed with the arrival of “talkies” in the late 1920s. These techniques also made distribution of a film to other countries a relatively painless affair - only the intertitles had to be translated. One forward-thinking but overlooked inventor experimented with comic book dialogue balloons which appeared next to the actor who was speaking. Some attempts were made at overlaying the subtitles which used a second projector and glass slides of text which were manually switched out by the projectionist, hopefully in synchronization with the dialogue. These were full-screens of text inserted (not overlaid) into the film at appropriate places. Since the first movies didn’t have sound, they used what are now called intertitles to convey dialogue and expository information. Subtitles are as old as movies themselves. Titles Before Talkies Intertitles from the 1920 film The Cabinet of Dr Caligari
Subtitles are targeting an audience who can hear the program but want to view the dialogue for some reason, like understanding a foreign movie or learning a new language. Roughly speaking, closed captions are targeting the deaf and hard of hearing audience. Finally, “Subtitles for the Deaf or Hard-of-hearing” (SDH) is a more verbose style that adds even more descriptive information about the program, including the speaker’s name, off-camera events, etc. Ordinary captioning includes the dialogue, but with the addition of occasional cues for music or a non-visible event (a doorbell ringing, for example). Pure dialogue (nothing more) is often the style of captioning you see in subtitles on a DVD or Blu-ray.
The text contained in captions generally falls into one of three categories. Subtitles: Rendered in a graphical format and overlaid onto the video / film. In the NTSC system, it’s often referred to as Line 21, since it was transmitted on video line number 21 in the Vertical Blanking Interval (VBI). Usually they can be enabled or disabled by the user. I often use the word captioning which encompasses both closed captions and subtitles: Closed Captions: Transmitted in a non-visible manner as textual data. I may have been the last engineer working with analog captioning as everyone else moved on to digital.īut before digging in, there is a lot of confusing and imprecise language floating around on this topic. Back in the early 2000s, I unexpectedly found myself involved in a variety of closed captioning projects, both designing hardware and consulting with engineering teams at various consumer electronics manufacturers. In fact, it was quite a struggle for captioning to become commonplace. Closed captioning on television and subtitles on DVD, Blu-ray, and streaming media are taken for granted today.