Worldwide history of television captioning

1
Worldwide history of television captioning

• Giacomo Pirelli
• FIADDA
• Italian association of deaf and hard of hearing
  people

2-6 July, Vancouver
2
Introduction

• Accessibility to information is vital to deaf
  people and to everybody through technical
  solutions proposed by the television networks,
  such as captioning
• This theme has been well tackled in North-America
  and the UK. It has to be improved in countries
  where the media are still only partially
  accessible to everyone
• Aim of following the technological evolution of
  the media and of new ways of organising, handling
  and broadcasting many kinds of TV programs.

3
Introduction
In several European countries, we try to follow
the example of Canada and USA, where the rights
of people with disabilities are defined by the
ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) approved in
1990.

• complete access to information,
• full recognition of disabilities without
  discrimination by the persons without handicap
• accessibility of public buildings, train
  stations, airports, etc.
• the UK and other English-speaking countries have
  followed this American model in the social,
  informative and political field.

4
Captioning in USA and Canada
Caption and sequence of the movie The Kid
directed by Charlie Chaplin in 1921
5
Captioning in USA and Canada
The ancestor of modern movie captioning were
intertitles, that is captions used as dialogues
and as descriptions of sequences in mute movies
(Charlie Chaplin). Captioning started in USA in
1948 at the cinema. Television captioning started
in the US in 1970 when the National Bureau of
Standards decided to create a portion of the
network signal to send information at a national
level.
6
Captioning in USA and Canada
In 1972, in the USA, PBS (Public Broadcasting
Service) broadcast the French Chef with subtitles
embedded in the screen (open-captioning)
In 1976 the FCC (Federal Communications
Commission) adopted line 21 of Vertical Blanking
Interval (VBI), which would then be used in
closed-captioned broadcasting On 16th March 1980
in the US the first regularly closed-captioned
television serial was broadcast with a specific
decoder for the subtitles
7
Captioning in USA and Canada
Television captioning arrived in Canada in
1981. In 1982 television real-time captioning
started in the US with the Oscars, then the Los
Angeles Olympic Games in 1984. In 1990 the
Federal Communications Commission (FCC) approved
the Television Decoder Circuitry Act, requiring
that by 1993 all television sets had decoders
incorporated to visualize captions. In 1994 Web
TV captioning of the video online Information
Superhighway Speech of the USA VP, Al Gore. As
of 1st January 2006, all the new programs in
English, analogically broadcast after 1998 and
those digitally broadcast after 2002, had to be
captioned.
8
Captioning in UK
Teletext was born in 1972 in the UK with the
system Ceefax by BBC. In 1979 television
subtitling started in the UK for the 1 time in
Europe with a BBC broadcast Quietly in
Switzerland, a documentary about deaf
children. In 1986 the television real time
captioning arrived in UK. BBC first captioned
program was Blue Peter, a program for children.
The first live captioned events of large
importance were Margaret Thatcher's resignation
and The Gulf War in 1990.
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Captioning in UK

• In 1995 the BBC created a system of
  live-subtitling with time intervals, the BBC Live
  Subtitling System, where the stenographers and
  the subtitlers could work in different programs
  simultaneously.
• In 1996 the first live captioned event for the
  BBC and the EuropeanBroadcasting was the Olympic
  Games of Atlanta by stenotyping.
• In 1999 the Commission of Ofcom(Office of
  Communications) decidedto extend subtitling to
  100 of theprograms in all the seven BBC
  channels.
• Since 2001 BBC started to try out the respeaking
  to subtitle their broadcasts in real time. This
  new professional role allowed subtitlers to have
  more rapid training to produce the subtitles in
  acceptable quality and in shortest time possible.

10
Captioning in UK

• In 2003, BBC introduced a new system of live
  subtitling, K-live. It permitted stenographers
  and respeakers spread in the whole nation to work
  together for the same program.
• In October 2007 Alan Mc Guffog, responsible for
  Red Bee Media, said at the EBU conference that
  respeaking covered 60 of BBC television
  programs.
• In May 2008 for the first time BBC was very close
  to reach 100 of captioned broadcasts 2 years
  after the US.

11
Captioning in Asia, Oceania, Europa

• In 1979 the New Zealand TV company broadcast the
  first captioned television news program, News
  Review, for 15 minutes, with also an interpreter
  of New Zealand Sign Language.
• In 1982 the ABC network broadcast the first
  closed-captioned broadcast in Australia.
• In 1983 the first captioned program was broadcast
  by the NHK in Japan.
• In 1985 real time subtitling started in France
  with a rugby tournament and tennis at Wimbledon
  on Antenne 2, a year before the BBC.

12
Captioning in Asia, Oceania, Europa

• In 1986, the RAI (the Italian public TV station)
  experimented captioning with the film Rear window
  by Alfred Hitchcock.
• On 1st July 1992 the Czech Television started to
  subtitle a broadcast.
• In Australia live subtitling started in 1993.
• In 1999 RAI experimented live subtitling for the
  newscasts, and in 2001 also for extraordinary
  editions of main events
• In december 2001 the NHK, in Japan, started the
  respeaking for the entertainment program Kohaku
  Utagassen.

13
Captioning in Italy
In 2007 RAI signed a new Service Contract for
three years with a commitment to increase from
18 to 60 the programs accessible to deaf people
through LIS interpreting, pre-recorded and live
subtitling. in June RAI reached 27 of captioned
TV programs.
In the last months RAI started live subtitling
of sport events
14
Experience in London
I participated at the Londons Disability Rights
Festival in 2006 and i watched the large screen
of the live concert which showed us the subtitles
and the BSL interpreter.
15
FIADDA
Motto Dont turn your back on! A deaf child
needs to see a person and hear better.
FIADDA is the Italian association of deaf and
hard of hearing people. It was founded in 1972 by
the families with deaf children. Its national
office is in Genoa and there are regional offices
in several main tows. Its President is Silvana
Baroni. Since as 1996, FIADDA collaborates with
the VOICE Project of the European Commission
Joint Research Centre for the use of speech
recognition systems for subtitling.
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FIADDA

• Main aims
• helping the young deaf to be integrated at the
  school, university, work and life through
  different solutions, such as subtitling of TV,
  university lessons, conferences, holy messes,
  etc.,
• advising the families in choosing the speech
  therapists for children or young people, the
  cochlear implant or other hearing aids,
• organizing national and international conferences
  on deafness, social inclusion and political
  rules.
• encouraging strongly - or forcing - the
  Government and the TV broadcasters to improve
  their activities in this field and respect the
  subtitling contract,
• activating the service of text messages for
  emergency in many cities and spread better
  information about deafness to persons without
  hearing problems.

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End

• I have been a member of FIADDA and have worked
  with it for many years.
• When I was a University student, I tried to make
  teachers and fellow-students aware of the needs
  of deaf communities about subtitling.
• My M.A. thesis dealt with subtitling and I also
  reported on this topic at an international
  seminar in Turkey 2008.
• At present I work at the University of Turin web
  site and I develop awareness on the needs of deaf
  students and workers.
• A large coordination of the subtitling in Europe
  could solve those problems due to a more
  fragmented area than the USA from a linguistic
  and organizational point of view.

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End

• Thank you for the attention!
• Giacomo Pirelli
• email giac_pirelli_at_hotmail.com