Closed Captioning

For the past couple of weeks, I have been learning how to do closed captioning for Tribal Trails!

Although the task is a long and mildly painful one, it has so many benefits for sharing the Gospel!

How is it used to share the gospel?

If you have ever watched Tribal Trails, you know that it is a conversation and interview-based show. This means that there is A LOT of talking, most of which would be missed if you were hard of hearing. Thankfully closed captioning is a tool that has been created so no one is excluded from hearing the gospel and the testimonies of those changed by it.

Did you know that a half-an-hour long program takes approximately 2 hours to do the closed captioning? Every episode this is someone's job to sit down, make sure all the words are correct and do something called time stamping. Time stamping is how you make sure the right words come on the screen at the right time, otherwise, you wouldn't be reading what is being said at the moment!

Now just imagine, if someone is willing to put 2 hours into making sure people can read what the program is saying, how much more time people put into editing the program itself!?

A short history of closed captioning:

One of the main people we can thank for closed captioning is Emerson Romero!

Romero was an early film actor and a Charlie Chaplin impersonator in the 1920s. He was also deaf!

In 1929, Movies that had sound started coming out, pushing silent films out of the market and making them obsolete. This was definitely a problem for the deaf community. They used to be able to sit down and enjoy a movie just as everyone else but now there is a large component missing, the sound, which was never a problem before.

Romero was interested in the technical aspects of film creation and because he was also an actor, he wanted the film industry to stay accessible for everyone to enjoy! He started experimenting by placing word cards between scenes of each film and renting them out. This, unfortunately, didn't take off because film being accessible was not a priority at this time.

A new method of captioning for film emerged in Belgium shortly after this Captions were etched onto the finished print of the film. "America the Beautiful" (A 1951 propaganda film made to sell war bonds) became the first film in America to feature captions using the Belgian captioning technique.

Captioned versions of Hollywood films for deaf and hard-of-hearing audiences were not required by law until 1958.