Television has provided information, excitement and entertainment to American families for over thirty years, but for many people, the sounds of the television simply could not be heard.

In the year 1985, there were 21.2 million people who suffered from some form of hearing disability, which made up 9 percent of the entire American population.

Today these 21.2 million people are able to enjoy almost half of all prime time programming as well as talk shows and even presidential debates.

The government created an organization in 1979 to provide a majority of the subtitles and closed captioning that we now see on television.

Thousands of videotaped movies, also have subtitles thanks to this agency. We find that the percentage of closed captioned shows is approximately 12 or 13 percent, when we consider a six major station market, with each station having 18 hours of programming daily.

You may be interested to learn that around one third of children’s shows incorporate captioning.

The main role of this organization is to get networks to caption as many of their programs as possible. Sadly, that’s not such an easy job to do.

The market that can be reached through closed captioning is new enough that many producers and other network executives are just now becoming aware Brand Viagra of it. In fact, they only realized what people with hearing loss and deafness required, after we spoke with them.

Some of them expressed reluctance at this time to caption their programs because the current estimate for a close captioned audience is close to one million people.

The one million estimate comes from the number of decoders which are known to be in use, which is 150,000 homes. And that number is anticipated to go up at least by 30,000 by the end of this year.

We refer to this as the chicken or the egg dilemma, as in which comes first, since it’s the number of captioned programs that influences the viewer numbers, which in turn affect how many programs are captioned.

For a one hour progam, it costs between $1,500 and $2,200 to provide subtitles. The cost will fluctuate depending upon what show it is, how much dialog there is and how difficult the script Levitra Professional is.

Other decisions must be made as well, such as when a caption should appear on the screen and what length of time will be needed for viewers to read it.

Closed captioning is a quicker process when we are working with action movies. As an example, the script for a movie like “Raiders of the Lost Ark” calls for a different amount of subtitles than “A Man for All Seasons.”

The Public Broadcasting Service, the Department of Education, and other businesses, provide the necessary funding for certain shows while foundations and NCI fund other programs. A lot of the times, the price for the closed captioning is paid by several parties.

The variables affecting the problem of the size of the audience are due partly to the decoder itself as well as to public awareness. The decoder originally cost $280 when it was introduced in 1980.

The average is now just about $200.

Grants are searched out in order to provide low income families with decoders.

We are currently running a campaign in several major American cities to provide decoders for as little as $35; we want TV manufacturers to see that there is a demand for decoders and that the technology need not be expensive so that one day they’ll build TV’s with built-in decoders, just like stereos are today.

Many Americans suffer through compromised hearing without this disability even being apparent to others.

Even though Americans with hearing problems make up the largest physically disabled group in America, due to the fact the disability is often not obvious the hearing impaired end up isolated.

Closed captioning is such a great feature to have because it can bring together families and help them enjoy something together for a change.

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Category: Health
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