In March 2013, amendments to the Air Carrier Access Act were introduced to the US Senate, requiring domestic and foreign air carriers to ensure that all visually displayed entertainment is accessible, including by making available captioning and audio description for people who are Deaf, hearing impaired, blind, or vision impaired.
The report will draw on a range of approaches from across the world, both in English and other languages and will examine how various countries such as the UK, USA and Australia ensure the accuracy of closed captions on broadcast television.
Today, news bulletins around the world are routinely captioned using a number of different techniques. Live elements of a program are captioned by ‘stenocaptioners’ who use a stenographic keyboard, or by captioners using speech recognition software. These techniques did not exist in 1973, so the first captioned bulletin, called The Captioned ABC Evening News, was a repeat of the bulletin that had gone to air at 6 pm. This gave a team of six captioners time to prepare the captions for broadcast.
In Europe three separate companies are introducing captioning or captioning and audio description to Italy and Spain through innovative devices.
