Writing for closed-captioned television for the hearing-impaired

The National Captioning Institute, a public corporation created by the Congress, provides captions on commercial and public television, cable and home video for the hearing-impaired segment of the U.S. population. NCI is supported jointly by major television networks, syndicators and cable companies and receives appropriations from Congress and the private sector. Captions are broadcast in coded digital form so that the general public is not annoyed by them, and decoded for use in homes by the hearing impaired. Research has guided selection of presentation rates and editing techniques. Both prerecorded captions for video taped programs and ‘live’ captioning for news are discussesd.