National Captioning Institute history

In 1981, RCA/Columbia Pictures Home Video became the first video company to release movies on videotape that had closed captions.

In 1982, The National Captioning Institute developed a process for real time captioning, which could be used to caption a live broadcast.

It led to the passage of the Television Decoder Circuitry Act in 1990, mandating that all new television sets 13 inches or larger manufactured for sale in the United States contain caption-decoding technology.

The bill called for all analog television receivers manufactured on July 1, 1993, and going forward to have the ability to display closed captioning.

1996 – Telecommunications Act of 1996 required that digital television receivers contain caption-decoding technology

We've been providing closed captioning, subtitling and related services since 1997 to a broad range of organizations, including broadcasters, corporations, independent producers, post houses, schools, libraries, churches and government agencies.

In 2006, National Captioning Institute terminated the employment of 14 employees who had joined the National Association of Employees and Transmission Technicians in an effort to have reasonable workloads, receive annual cost-of-living raises, and prevent cuts in employee benefit plans.

2010 – The Twenty-First Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act requires broadcasters to provide captioning for television programs redistributed on the web and for HDTV-decoding boxes to include a button that controls closed captioning in the output signal.

She worked in production as Director of Offline Captioning and Audio Description media until 2013.

She was instrumental in the development of the Best Practices for Captioning adopted in the FCC March 2015 order and currently serves on the FCC’s Disability Advisory Committee.

© 2020 National Captioning Institute.