Writing for closed-captioned television for the hearing-impaired

The National Captioning Institute (NCI), a public corporation created by Congress, provides captions on commercial and public television, cable and home video for the hearing-impaired. NCI is supported jointly by major television networks, syndicators and cable companies and receives appropriations from Congress and the private sector. Captions are broadcast in code digital form so that the general public is not annoyed by them, and decoded for use in homes by the hearing impaired. The author explains how writers at the NCI have dealt with this challenge. Both prerecorded captions of video taped programs and `live´ captioning for news are discussed.