“Closed-captioning is the most important development in this century for bringing deaf and hard of hearing people into the mainstream.” ~National Closed-Captioning Institute

Closed-captioning has rapidly grown from a fairly unknown service for people who are hearing impaired to a vast, global communications service that touches the lives of millions of people daily. Over the past fifteen years, the United States government has recognized the huge impact that closed-captioning has upon the lives of the hearing impaired, and has responded accordingly. In 1990, the Americans with Disabilities Act was passed to ensure equal opportunity for persons with disabilities. Title III of this act requires that public facilities such as hospitals, bars, shopping centers, and museums provide verbal information on televisions, films and slides. This act also states that federally-funded public service announcements must also be captioned.

Congress continued to show its support for closed-captioning by passing the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which established an eight-year transition period for the close-captioning of all television programs; and programs such as the National Association of the Deaf's Captioned Media Program insure that there are a rich diversity of library materials available free of charge to the hearing impaired. We are proud to have 10 of our Five Star Educational productions selected for inclusion in their library.

While clients who are mandated to serve the hearing impaired community have turned to us for close-captioning support, agencies who are not mandated to provide close-captioning have also expressed interest in reaching out to this audience. In both cases, we are happy to provide closed-captioning services for your productions, which meet federal requirements.

We offer two types of close captioning services, pop-on and roll-up. The most popular style, pop-on, appears one line at a time, and matches shot changes so as to compete as little as possible with the action on the screen. You'll often see this kind of captioning on movies, sitcoms and high-action videos. Roll-up captioning, as the name implies, rolls up from the bottom of the screen, usually three lines at a time, in synch with the dialog. You'll often find this style of closed-captioning on news programs, talk shows and documentaries.