After years of intense lobbying by the entire hard-of-hearing community, the National Association of the Deaf (NAD) has gotten a commitment from the National Football League (NFL) and FOX Broadcasting to provide closed captions for the entire Super Bowl XLV broadcast this Sunday—including all advertisements that will be aired.
Everyone knows the Super Bowl is more than a football game. In fact, in the Madison Avenue circles where I used to move, it’s more a Super Bowl of advertising than an athletic contest. It’s where the most creative minds in media and entertainment show off their best and brightest ideas every year. That’s why when I lost most of my hearing, it enraged me that so few of the ads had captions.
A lot of other people were mad, too, and all the lobbying seemingly has finally paid off. I say “seemingly” because, when it comes to broadcaster and advertiser commitments to provide captions, seeing is believing. It’s not enough to say you’ll provide the captions.You have to actually follow through on your commitment:
- First, you really DO have to provide the captions (that’s right, even after the FCC mandated captions on all broadcast TV several years ago, there are still complaints about many shows that simply don’t have them).
- You also have to provide captions that that are comprehensible (sometimes there are more dropped lines than not in a live broadcast, and I’ve tried to decipher thousands of lines of gobbledygook trying to pass themselves off as dialogue in the captions I’ve followed over the past few years).
- And you can’t cut corners and costs by relying on your speech-recognition software without putting enough humans with brains at the captioning console. (I really did watch that show a few years ago about a “cereal killer” who murdered lots of people but didn’t once eat a bowl of corn flakes).
Therefore, the National Association of the Deaf, in its announcement of the agreement, encouraged everyone to keep score, not of the game, but of how well the NFL and FOX Broadcasting live up to their promise:
The deaf and hard of hearing community has engaged in an annual ritual of counting the number of captioned commercials and network promotions during the Super Bowl. Consumers are invited to join in this celebration by counting along as we reach our 100% captioning goal. The NAD is interested in learning about any technical issues that affect the pass through of captions to consumer’s television sets.
So, three cheers to the NAD and everyone else who brought enough pressure on the powers that be to bring captions to the world’s biggest stage. Let’s all keep score, and let’s let ’em have it if the broadcaster or the advertisers fumble the ball on providing good Super Bowl captions.
[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by DeafRead and Zabell Hearing, David Copithorne. David Copithorne said: At long last, Super Bowl ads will all have closed captions. Hooray! http://bit.ly/f3BlvM http://fb.me/QeZG3gDx […]