Someone who has never heard of closed captioning might assume that it's not possible for a deaf person to watch and enjoy a television show. How can they understand what's going on if they can't hear the dialogue or sound effects? However, deaf people are remarkably clever about making sure they're able to get all the information they need, even if it's buried in the audio track of an ad for a Toronto sports clinic. The method they have developed for understanding TV shows without sound is closed captioning. We'll tell you more about it here.

With captioning, the audio track of a program such as a reality TV show about a wife who wants to know how to know if he is cheating is translated by an interpreter into text which is displayed at the bottom of the screen. This is often done in films that are filmed in another language as well, with the major difference being they cannot be separated from the video and are called subtitles. Subtitles also do not include sound effects like captioning does, which can be essential to plot (for instance, the sound of a fire alarm ringing or a knock at the door).

There are two types of captions - open, which means they're burned into the video, and closed, where they're contained in a separate stream. Closed captioning is what is most often used on TV programs about nose jobs in Toronto so people who can hear do not need to be distracted by text appearing at the bottom of the screen. When the captions are closed, they must be turned on at the television end. Most new televisions can display closed captions with the click of a button on the remote.

Closed captions are generally written prior to the program's broadcast by a translator, who is often called a speech-to-text interpreter, edited, and then included in a separate stream with the broadcast. However, this only works with pre-filmed TV shows and documentaries on sheaves. For live broadcasts, such as breaking news or sporting events, networks must hire a live on-the-spot interpreter to type the text as it's happening, with perhaps only a few seconds' broadcast delay.

So who uses closed captions? Just the deaf and hard of hearing? No! You would be surprised at the wide usage of closed captions among people who can hear perfectly fine. Foreign language ACH vendors who have trouble understanding fast spoken English will often turn on subtitles to help them understand. People in loud rooms, such as bars or parties, will read closed captions because the ambient noise drowns out the soundtrack. And in situations where the TV sound would bother another person, many people read closed captions instead.