When Good Captions Go Bad
A Story or Two about HDTV Accessibility
By Larry Goldberg
By now most people have seen the big and beautiful future of television: high resolution, wide-screen, enormous TV sets with images so life-like the action seems to jump right out at you. But, where are the captions?
This new type of television, with images as big as life is known as HDTV, high definition television (also known simply as "digital TV").
What you may not have seen are the closed captions that go with it, even though the new TV sets are required by law to carry the captions and virtually all programs are required by law to be captioned.
How can this be? After all, the TV Decoder Circuitry Act of 1990 stated explicitly that, "As new video technology is developed, the Commission [FCC] shall take such action as the Commission determines appropriate to ensure that closed-captioning service continues to be available to consumers."
