Closed Captioning: More Ingenious than You Know

It's crazy that no one made a font out of these captions. I see that VCR OSD font everywhere now, but the caption font is hard to find. The closest I could get is Z86229 Caption Chip font, but the lowercase letters are not the same as the ones shown in the SpongeBob clip here. What a mysterious yet nostalgic font

Is isn't he said that in the TV guardian

Every accessibility success story that leaves the whole world better off is a direct result of advocacy work, public funds, and regulation. Remember this when the private tech giants try to convince you they’re here to save disabled people.

Closed captioning on MTV and TV shows in the late 1990s and early 2Ks helped me build vocabulary and develope my English speaking skills when I was a teen as a non-native English speaker. 😊

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да ,да ,да. я с технологических связей пришел поставить автору оригинала лайк и и написать комент

How can a computer decode this line? I always wondered what data there was. Sometimes it exists even when there are no subtitles.

Well produced video. Worth a sub. Good job!

K O A L A ‌ ‌ B E A R S ‌ ‌ E A T ‌ ‌ L E A V E S .

Man, I miss hearing DTMF tones. :(

as someone with auditory processing disorder, i greatly appreciate you putting in the effort for making correct captions 💕

We had Teletext subtitling in UK and we did have VCRs that had teletext built in to record subtitles, by late 90s we had VCRs have CC decoder built in as well as teletext they were very expensive i have a Panasonic that has both cost me 500 pounds in 1999. but these VCRs were made by Sanyo, Panasonic and Hitachi using Movie Text. they were poorly promoted and rarely got sold on

Looks like that old Sony Trinitron color television in this video is as old as the 1994 Nissan Pathfinder in The Challenge. Also, looks like Alec Watson has a Sony PlayStation 3 Super Slim (the top loading PS3) like the one my dad has.

OMG, I'm 12 seconds into this video, but those first 12 seconds...have not heard those sounds in a long while.

Like my other comments say, captions were in uppercase only because the original caption fonts were poorly designed and didn’t include descenders, making lowercase more illegible. This isn’t true anymore, and there’s no excuse for captioning in uppercase.

The Caption Center and VITAC used mixed case for voices through telephones and communicators before switching to lowercase (as seen in the SpongeBob clip). NCI used it for whispering. Moreover, NCI and VITAC used uppercase descriptions, [NONSPEECH INFORMATION] from NCI and [ NONSPEECH INFORMATION ] from VITAC (and some Canadian companies).

Some really early FOX Blu-rays (The Simpsons Movie) had CCs designed for analog outputs. However, line 21 captions from the PS3 can be viewable on HDMI, using the CC button on the control panel.

The term "hearing impaired" is long out of use. Please use "deaf and hard of hearing," and refrain from othering, e.g. "I'm glad they can enjoy the same things as *the rest of us*. No need to speak as though deaf and hard of hearing people aren't already in the room nor part of every community. Thanks!

Just brilliant stuff Alex, love it

I love captions on things because for those of us with adhd, it can really help us to have captions so if we have audio processing issues, we can still keep up and know what’s going on

In some movie theaters now you can ask for smart glasses that show the CCs directly in your field of vision.

This is great for the Deaf or hard of hearing, not so great for those of us who are blind or visually impaired.

Where I am not slamming either open or closed captioning, I AM slamming folks who use subtitles to translate spoken language content into written text that people can READ at the bottom of the screen.

An example: a news broadcast that is in english, yet has folks they are interviewing speaking in their mother toungue. Fine, so far as it goes, but if your blind or visually impaired, like I am, subscript(or text) DOES NOT WORK! I can’t understand what I can not hear or see! By not providing translation for these parts, I have just lost the content of the video.

Things have improved. I will say that much. Yet there needs to be a standard way of translation for the blind and visually impaired so that spoken language content can also be translateed into an audio format. By the way, this is not the same as visual discription. THIS process helps the blind and visually impaired follow the action and visual content on the screen and does not do language translation. This needs to change, and, in my humble opinion, be backward compatible. This would be a game changer for sure- I could then watch any show knowing that I could understand all of what is being said in a language I can hear and understand!

If you haven't already, I would love you to make a video about microfiche.

Thank you for being one of those who captions their vids.

I have a Bluray player with native composite out and unfortunately, It seems that it doesn't support line 21 captions

On Chinese television, there are subtitles on all shows, whether you want it or not.

But I have my VCR connected to my pc (via HDMI), displayed through OBS and have no way to decode the captions!!! From the research I've done, it seems possible to use my VCR's coaxial out>3.5mm into my pc's "line-in" port on my motherboard, at least that's my theory for now till
I can find a coaxial cable adapter like this. It may be a matter of coverting the analog output to digital, so that may be too tall an order for a simple cable. Any help is appreciated, friends, you'd be assisting the hearing impaired masses out there who still want to enjoy their VHS without a CRT!

You should do a post on screen display and Dolby too

James here, still waiting on that Teletext video.

I always wondered why DVD gives a whole megabit for captions, but learning that they're bitmaps explains it.

so i watch with subtitles always on and i never get why people dont like that

There's no place like forced 1080p

Yep. It’s This Useful Trend. You Know Exactly What I’m Talking About With This Trend. And It Dominated Many VHS Tapes, LaserDiscs, And DVDs, Excluding Blu-Rays. And It Was Closed Captioning. It Started Out With RCA/Columbia Pictures Home Video In 1983 When The National Captioning Institute Closed Captioned Their 12 Home Video Releases. But Then It Began To Spread Later That Year When The NCI Was Doing It For Other Distributers As Well Like Paramount And MGM/UA Home Video. And Then It Continued To Spread The Following Year When The NCI Was Doing It For Other Distributers As Well Like MCA Home Video, Warner Bros, And CBS/Fox Video. And They Were Even Doing It For Disney And Family Home Entertainment. Beforehand, It Started Out With The First Television Series To Be Fully Closed Captioned Being Broadcast In 1980. A Year After The National Captioning Institute Was Formed.

Was the teletext video made at any point? I wasn't able to find it...

I found this video because I am on the search to learn why I can’t get my smart TV to show my VHS captions.
I have Samsung smart tv and a Samsung combo vhs/dvd player. I hooked up the player to the TV via component cable (because I read that HDMI doesn’t work) but im not sure what else to do beyond that. After switching to the AV input source and pressing the player’s menu on remote, I tried to activate the captions, but they still aren’t working. The movie plays though.

(And the VHS we want to play does have the symbol on the back, so I know it’s embedded)

I'm more curious how CC is possible with over the air channels. I'm always mystified how data can be sent over regular radio waves, even when the signal is poor. Some TVs even get metadata for the show or channel you're watching and that always confuses me

It would genuinely get me to go to movie theatres more if they did what some opera houses do for foreign operas. Where there's a separate display either above or below the film that includes captions for what you're watching.

Do you think they would have called captioned video "woke" if that word existed back then...

Huh, I always thought the "closed" part referred to the black background. Like ENclosed. Today I learned.

Even for those who aren't hard of hearing, closed captioning does a lot for quality of life

Youre cool dude

I always found teletext fascinating, how they managed to get pages and pages of information, even computer programs (as sent down a BBC computer telextext adaptor) just over those blankng lines incredible. Even as it was 1977 when I first saw it, and Prestel was in its infancy.

4 Years later, still no TeleText video :(