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Caption House: The best choice for professional closed
captioning services
The importance of closed captioning
Twenty-eight million Americans, or about ten percent of the population, are deaf or hard of hearing.
They rely on closed captioning as a means to gain access to the same television, film, and video
resources that hearing individuals enjoy.
However, the benefits of closed captioning extend far beyond the deaf or hard of hearing community.
As time goes by, the general population is beginning to recognize its other useful applications.
For example, it is not uncommon to see closed captioned programming in noisy public environments
such as airports, public lobbies, and sports bars.
Another 28 million Americans are foreign-born. For many, English is not their native language.
New immigrants rely heavily on closed captioned programming to enhance their mastery of the English
language and to better familiarize themselves with the customs of their host country. This applies
to the children of immigrants as well: More than three million K-12 students are Limited English
Proficient.
Eighteen million Americans are under five years of age. Studies have shown that exposure to closed
captioned programming at a young age accelerates reading progress among children.
Closed captioning as law
If you’re in the broadcasting industry these days, it’s pretty hard to ignore captioning.
The Telecommunications Act, first established by the FCC in 1996, made closed captioning mandatory
for broadcasters. By establishing a series of benchmarks, the law allowed for a gradual phasing
in of this technology over the next decade. As of January 1, 2006, the last benchmark was reached
and captioning became mandatory for 100 percent of English programming (with a few special exceptions).
Likewise, Spanish broadcasters are required to air 1350 hours of captioned programming per quarter.
Broadcasters are taking notice.
Media accessibility
However, providing accessible media for the deaf and hard of hearing community is not just about
complying with federal law; it’s also about social responsibility. When you offer captioned
broadcasts, you are increasing the value of your programming -- making it available to a wide
group of people who otherwise would not have had access to your content. Captioning is a service
that betters our community and enhances the teaching power of media.
Our closed captioning services
We work primarily with the top selling Computer Prompting & Captioning
Co.® (CPC) software; however we have the facilities to deliver other major captioning
software formats as well. You may request a caption file only (you do the encoding), or if you
prefer, we can encode your program masters here at our facilities and send you a ready-for-broadcast
captioned master.
What languages do we speak?
We provide captioning services for English, Spanish, and Portuguese.
Our team
Our captioning staff is a highly skilled and qualified group of professionals who take extreme
pride in their work. They are all native speakers of the language being captioned.
We look forward to hearing from you! For information and rate quotes
for our professional closed captioning services, call 305.948.7300.
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