If you are deaf, hard of hearing, in a noisy room, or learning through visual aids, you have witnessed or are familiar with closed captioning. It can usually be found in hopefully every TV show out there in the same format, same font, and same small white type in black boxes. In an era where television has become such an important part of our daily lives, closed captioning has become one of the biggest technological innovations for the deaf and hard of hearing. So how many of you know where it came from and who invented it? Without hands? Well here’s some info to pack into that brain of yours.
Bill Kastner, that’s not a name you’re familiar with, is it? A long time ago, Bill had a speech impediment, a stutter, and this would obviously impede his ability to communicate. Throughout high school, he used Morse code as a means of speaking to others without stuttering. This early affection for technology and innovation sparked an interest that would later help him invent a set-top box that would change the world.
A few decades later, Bill Kastner would be hired as an engineer for the well-known Texas Instruments company. In the mid-1970s, the Public Broadcasting Service contracted with Texas Instruments to create a device that would allow the deaf to read what was being said on television. Bill Kastner and his team designed a decoder that would decode the first message to be transmitted over radio waves: “Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.” The experiment was a success and soon after became known as “closed captioning.”
Set-top boxes were not as we know them today, tiny little chips similar to a computer chip or SD card. Set-top boxes started out as big black boxes that were separate from your TV, costing hundreds of dollars each! In addition to being largely inaccessible to the deaf and hard of hearing communities in general, closed captioning was a hit almost from the start. Years later, this popularity would push the United States federal government to create legislation in 1993 declaring that all televisions 13 inches or larger had these built-in decoders.
Although closed captioning was not an invention per se, was an idea that would never have existed without the invention of the cable box by Bill Kastner. To this day, closed captioning is widely used, and not just by people who are deaf or hard of hearing. Even Bill himself may be caught reading them while he works out at his local YMCA. They have evolved and inspired so much that we are seeing different types of captioning styles and new avenues of equitable accessibility, for example, described audio and captioning glasses for movie theaters. The future looks bright and it’s thanks to Bill Kastner.