Is there such a thing as TV for the hearing impaired? There is indeed and most of us have experienced it to some extent. If you have ever watched a foreign language film on television, chances are that unless you spoke that language, you watched the film with subtitles. TV for the hearing impaired follows the same principle except that the subtitles need to be activated either via the settings menu on your TV (newer versions) or by an external decoder. This is known as closed captioning. The term “closed” is used because it requires the viewer to actually activate the captioning.

TV for the hearing impaired (with closed captioning) was first successfully broadcast in 1973 with the cooperation of PBS station WETA in Washington D.C. At first it was limited to only pre-recorded programs. By 1982 however, real-time captioning was developed for live broadcasts, a very important development in TV for the hearing impaired.

1990 saw a great leap forward for people suffering from hearing loss. The Television Decoder Circuitry Act was passed, which impacted directly on TV for the hearing impaired. This law required that all analogue television sets which had screens 13 inches or larger – sold or manufactured – have the ability to display closed captioning by 01. July 1993. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 extended this ruling to include digital sets, with 01. July 2002 given as the date of compliance. TV for the hearing impaired received a further boost when TV programming distributors in the U.S. were informed that closed captioning for Spanish language programming must be provided by no later than 01. January 2010.

Sources: howstuffworks.com, Wikipedia