Hidden Signals
When inclusion and engineering came together through public service
A BILL
To require new televisions to have built in decoder circuitry. Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,
If you spend any amount of time watching movies or shows at home or on the go, you know those times when you just need to turn on captions. A convenience sometimes to simply understand the various global languages and dialects while for some a necessity to understand a program.
I had one of my most meaningful conversations about this topic at the recently completed Okoboji Writers and Songwriters Retreat.
Random Collisions
The conversation happened the first morning of the retreat during breakfast at our inn when Senator Tom Harkin took a seat next to me. We talked about many things and the relaxed breakfast meeting was a perfect opportunity to learn about his work that led to the creation and passage of Americans with Disabilities Act. As I learned about the work, his eyes lit up about another contemporaneous legislation he’d sponsored - S.1974 - Television Decoder Circuitry Act of 1990. Naturally, I had to ask him to tell me more.
That morning discussion led to late evening googling and reading about open and closed captions, television manufacturers, decoding platforms, bipartisan legislation and technology innovations that we now (thankfully) are able to take for granted
A brief background of captions
The National Association for Court Reporters and Captioners has captured a remarkably detailed history of captioning so rather than repeat their research, I’ll provide a link here and list the highlights if they’re TL;DR for you.
1949: Hollywood convinced to begin producing some films with text
1959: US Office of Education starts a division for captioned films.
1970: FCC considers captioning at request of a deaf woman who sought emergency announcements
1971: Early discussions in Nashville, TN by the Health Education and Welfare department lead to WGBH Boston experimenting with captioning an episode of Julia Child’s, “The French Chef”
1973: WGBH permitted to rebroadcast World News Tonight with open captions (permanent captions that cannot be removed)
The Sen Harkin connection
The 1970s became a decade pivotal for captioning. The Washington DC PBS station developed closed captioning technique (Go PBS!!), and the FCC approved the technology in 1976 despite industry opposition. The Senator Harkin we know today was then Representative Harkin (Iowa’s 5th District) and was approached about this and told of the prohibitive cost additions. To his credit, he pushed back with the argument that if decoder devices were ~$200 in experimental stage, wouldn’t they be expected to fall considerably in volume? It appears the decade-old Moore’s law guided his mind that day in DC.
The first commercially viable device, manufactured by Sanyo, came to market from Sears and was instrumental in delivery of the first regularly scheduled captioned program broadcast on network TV on Sunday March 16, 1980. Representative Harkin recalls delivering one of the first decoders to President Jimmy Carter and First Lady Rosalyn Carter in the White House with captioning, broadcasting and consumer leaders accompanying him to the celebration.
The growth he imagined happened in the next decade and the few dozen experimental decoders of the mid 70s mushroomed to nearly 30,000 devices decoding nearly 100 hours/week in 1986. The wheels of our bureaucracy turned faster then than present day and a bipartisan bill was developed in the subsequent four years. Representative Harkin of the 5th District was by then Senator Harkin representing the people of the State of Iowa.
Subsequent Legislation
The quote at the beginning of this story is the opening sentence of the 1990 legislation enacted by the 101st Congress of the United States. Its sponsors are remarkable in their across-the-aisle partnership. Senator Tom Harkin sponsored this legislation and was joined by Senators John McCain (AZ), Inouye (HI), Dole, Gore, Liberman, and nine others).
The legislation required all 13” and larger televisions manufactured or sold in the US to provide built-in capabilities to decode and display closed-captioned transmissions. It enshrined the technology and standard developed by PBS which carried closed captioning within the NTSC signal. The act is short, readable and direct and provides only six months to the FCC to develop the necessary rules to implement the Act.
The full text of the Act is available at Congress.gov.
How did captioning work in the analog age?
It is worth remembering that this all happened long before video signals were encoded as digital packets. Analog video streams in the US were encoded using the NTSC standard, an early TV standard often derided outside the US for its unreliability in displaying colors accurately. National Television Standards Committee was better known as Never Twice the Same Color.
Yet, the PBS engineers in DC were able to use line 21 (one of hundreds) of the analog signal for ‘placing’ textual caption data that was invisible within the broadcast image until a decoder sat between the antenna and TV. The decoder “read” the hidden text and overlaid it onto the video image in block white fonts on a black background.
That technology has come a long way and replaced by newer captioning standards used in digital broadcasting. Digital broadcasting has allowed for greater density of text streams to support multiple languages and tracks, allowing for commentary, broader accessibility, and more accurate distribution.
In fact, many video platforms are now able to not only show captions but also create captions from spoken words, in real time, and display them in multiple languages. Platforms such as YouTube routinely provide this capability as user-created content rarely, if ever, has accurate captions uploaded by the creators.
We’ve come a long way since the days of $200+ add-on devices that displayed captions in a single language. Today’s TV patron can watch programming and turn captions on/off at will, change display sizes, language, screen-placement, and more. Unprotected video streams allow users to extract captions and use them for unintended purpose (such as training AI on how spoken language is constructed so the AI can respond in natural language).
All while maintaining the original intended purpose - to extend the reach of a TV signal and the spoken words it contained to those who unable to hear clearly or at all.
And for that we owe gratitude to a young Representative from the 5th District of Iowa who heard the message early in his decades of public service, persisted through his House and Senate careers, and assembled colleagues who helped enshrine the technical capabilities into law so all Americans of different abilities could equitably benefit.
I think this excerpt from poet (and dear IWC friend) Kelsey Bigelow captures Representative/Senator Harkin’s actions. The full poem and accompanying article are at her Substack
I may not be the best swimmer but that will never stop me from diving in for you You’ve shown me how
I am grateful for the incredible community of writers and creatives of the Iowa Writers Collaborative who continue to inspire me through their curiosity, writing, poetry, songwriting, photography, public service, and selfless service to their communities large and small. You can experience the vastness of their expertise here.
Wow, I feel so much smarter after reading this. Thanks, Tej!
This is fascinating, Tej! Thank you for sharing this with us (and for including my poem!). Wonderful work!