Television Captioning for the Deaf

At the end of 1971 although there were in the United States and Canada over 100 million television receivers in use, the hearing-impaired community had been largely deprived of the benefits of television programming. With the exception of some sports events, the sound portion of the program carries a significant part of the intelligence so that without it the program cannot be enjoyed. While the hearing-impaired can be served to a limited extent by the addition of "open captions" to programs, (sub-titles seen on all receivers), viewers with normal hearing find open captions distracting and therefore it is not a general solution to the problem.