Back in the days we didn’t have closed caption, it was the most frustrating thing to deal with, I keep increasing the volume on the TV louder and louder until my parents would yell at me”Turn it down!”.
I couldn’t help but to want to turn the volume up and up since I didn’t want to miss anything that they were saying on the TV. Just before I graduated from high school I went to the local community deaf and hard of hearing center and t
hey helped me apply for a voucher to get a new closed caption box to connect to the TV. I was so excited the day when my magic box arrived and it was time to connect it to my TV. Within a matter of minutes I saw words coming out on the bottom of my screen and I was able to read what they were saying. I said “finally, now i can watch TV!” Over time I started to decrease the volume on my TV and get used to closed captions. Closed captioning is the most wonderful to thing to have in the hard of hearing and deaf world. I actually felt l that i can be part of the world again.
Over time I learned there were many benefits to closed captioning. For one you can actually watch TV in the living room and if other people are talking you are not interrupting them. It also helps when someone is trying to talk on the telephone and now you are not blaring the television so they are able to hear clearly on the telephone. Our son has watched closed captioned television from birth and it appears that he is very strong in reading comprehension. Teachers have told us that he is able to read at multiple grade levels above him and are surprised at some of the words he is able to understand. My husband is a huge movie geek and loves to hear every word. With closed captioning he is able to tell what is going on in even with the actors are whispering. We were even surprised on our first film where even the swear words would spelled out in closed captioning
One day we decided to upgrade our television to a new flat screen and my husband bought a HDMI cable to hook up the DVD player to the new television. We started to play a movie and to our shock there was no closed caption. We started fumbling through the book on the television and through DVD player to see what the issue was. Later through some research on the internet we found out that the HDMI signal does not pass by the Closed Caption convertor that is internal to the television set. If we were to watch something over the air waves it would but for some reason the HDMI signaling bypasses it and therefore there would be no more closed captioning for us. If you used standard Audio/Video jacks those signals do pass by the closed caption decoder so our VCR actually works still. For DVD’s though the movie industry has figured out that this is an issue and now makes sure that there are always English subtitles on new movies. Subtitles do not have everything in them that closed captioning did such as environment sounds and a lot of time you will not see the words to a song in subtitles even though you would in closed captioning. I think the song lyrics has something to do with licenses that subtitles are regulated by but closed captioning was exempt to.
We are now pleased with our new television, and we recently got digital cable and made sure our box would convert the closed captioning and transmit it through our HDMI cable. Overall closed captioning has made life easier on me and my son and I’m glad it’s around.
