In examining the issues surrounding the question of access
to the emerging National Information Infrastructure (NII),
the partners to the Project has broken the challenges down
into three basic areas: Source (or Content); Pipeline;
and End-user (or information appliances). This section of
this initial analysis examines the Content area.
A Brief History
To be completely accurate, it should be noted that captioning began as a standard part of the very first moving pictures. The interstitial titles on the early silent movies constituted a form of access to content for all. And, is too often the case, advancements in technology (i.e., the invention of movie sound) immediately created a group of people who were left out (i.e., people who could not hear). It wasn't until the late 1950's that the federal government tried to remedy the situation with the establishment of the Captioned Films for the Deaf program in the Department of Health, Education and Welfare. This early initiative provided subtitled (or "open captioned") 16mm copies of current movies which were then circulated among the deaf community.
In the early 1970's, a parallel program was begun on public television, where a limited number of television programs were open captioned, thus providing the first accessible electronic communications for people who were deaf or hard-of-hearing. It is however, the development of closed captioning, an electronic data format that gave users simultaneous access through the push of a button, that became the great advance toward universal access to television.
The Benefits of a Single Standard
An important lesson can be learned from the history of closed captioning by noting its exceedingly centralized beginnings. In the mid-70s, a relatively small number of engineers at the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) began working with their counterparts in the federal government, at ABC television, and at PBS-member station WGBH. The goal was to come up with a method for encoding hidden data (consisting of the text translation of the audio of a TV program) into a television signal, which would then be transmitted to all viewers' homes simultaneously and decoded back into a textual representation at will (with a special device).
The caption production process, the data encoding format, the transmission protocols, and the decoding device were all developed by the same team in a unified effort with voluntary support from the public and private sectors. This consolidated effort avoided the problem common to many new technology developments-- competing technical standards. Therefore, when the technology was launched in 1980, one single data format addressed one single end-user device and consumers were spared the problem of having to chose between competing systems.
The Drawbacks
Three mistakes that should not be made today in developing new standards and guidelines for access to electronic communications were made by the early developers of closed captioning. First, the data format was made proprietary, so that all closed-captioned access was controlled by a single agency. Second, the end-user had to purchase an expensive and unwieldy device as an add-on to his TV set in order to gain access to the medium. And the third mistake, which is the reason for the very existence of this movement for Universal Access to the NII, is that electronic access to television programs was a 30-year afterthought, a retrofit which hampered its growth and universality until 1993 when the TV Decoder Circuitry Act took effect. Developers of today's technology for access to the NII are well aware of this lesson, making every effort to build access in, not add it on.
Standards and Guidelines
The seriously debilitating monopolization of the early closed-captioning service did yield certain benefits still being realized today. First, the data format remains a common, universal, and robust one which has smoothly migrated to today's built-in technology and which is preparing to move by a consensus process into tomorrow's Advanced Television (ATV) system. Second, the look and feel of today's closed captions, their preparation and presentation, is relatively common on the thousands of hours of live and pre-recorded closed-captioned programs being distributed today. This near-common presentation is due to the fact that competition in the world of closed captioning was an extremely slow process, with at first only one, then two, then three organizations performing 95% of the captioning for the first ten years of its existence. With such a limited genesis, today's hundreds of captioning agencies can be guided by a common heritage.
This, for better or worse, is not likely to be the case in the development of access to the content of the NII. If we are to achieve a satisfactory level of access to the vast quantity of electronic communications flowing around the world, the inclusion of those access features (the "captioning" and "description" of the future) will have to be produced and proliferated by the producers of their own content. Though this Project and others are attempting to establish these technical standards and presentation guidelines, the difficulty of instituting them will be made tremendously more challenging due to the decentralization of the new communications environment.
Funding and Proliferation
The growth of the closed captioning service tracked a slow and gradual curve through the 1980's. What began in 1980 as a 15-hour per week dream became by the end of the decade a 400-hour per week reality. Of course, the availability of programming grew on an even steeper curve, with the three commercial and one public networks being matched by 1990 by hundreds of new broadcast, cable, and home video sources of programming.
Captioning began as a government-funded possibility and exists today with a strong role continuing to be played by millions of dollars provided by the Federal government through its Department of Education. And though the private sector today contributes more than half of the total dollars spent on captioning (through the networks, cable channels, producers, advertisers, home video distributors, ad agencies, and record companies), captioning would not exist without a federal subsidy. Today, closed captioning is widespread: on 100% of prime- time programming, most national news, most children's programs, much of daytime and late-night, pay cable, syndicated programs, top home-video releases, ads, and music videos.
However, an evident large gap exists in the presence of television captioning, and this gap is an important lesson for the future of new accessible communications: basic cable programming is at most captioned 5% of the time and it is the proliferation of a multitude of narrow-cast information services that most resembles the electronic communications environment of the future.
A Final Question
Without Federal interest, involvement, and funding, closed captioning would not exist today as a widespread and common service. The time of its birth, the nature of the media at that time, and the economy of the nation through captioning's early, fragile years fostered a successful access service. Could such a service be started today, with the changes in the economy, the media, the climate in Washington and in society? If the answer is no, then the lessons to be gained from the history of the growth of captioning must be examined closely. With all of these changes, not the least being the explosive growth in technology, new paradigms for assuring access to NII content must and will be developed, borrowing judiciously from the past but inventing much new for the future, with special attention to innovative production and economic models.
Technology
Audio description, unlike closed captioning, was not a service that relied heavily on the development of new technology. Carefully written descriptions which were artfully placed in between the dialog and narration of television programs, required no more technology than a word-processing computer and an audio mixing board. Delivery of the descriptions to the viewer was accomplished by means of the Second Audio Program (SAP) channel established as part of the Multichannel Television Stereo (MTS) standard adopted in the U.S. in 1985. This third audio channel (after the left and right stereo channels) was originally intended as an apt home for translations of a program's audio into another language. Though the SAP channel eventually became more readily and widely adopted as the home for DVS, it is worth noting that the SAP channel was intended as an access technology from its first development.
Audio description (or, as it is sometimes called, descriptive video ) eventually expanded to the home video world through a mail-ordered service of "open-described" popular videos (early titles included Top Gun, Ghost, Beauty and the Beast, and Pretty Woman). Though the cooperation and active support of PBS, its producers, and the Hollywood studios was required for audio description of television to begin to take root, it was substantial Federal funding, first from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and then from the U.S. Department of Education, that enabled the new service to initiate its start-up activities.
Standards and Guidelines
As in the pioneer days of closed captioning, descriptive video both benefits and suffers from being a virtual single-source service. At this point (early 1995) there are only two national providers of descriptive video-- WGBH and the Narrative Television Network. Though there are no technological barriers to entry into the field by others, limited funding and the lack of a widespread awareness and understanding of the service's value has resulted in slow growth (though not so far behind closed captioning's early days).
Lessons to be Learned
The benefit of this slow start-up period is that the content standard has had ample opportunity to become fully formed and those presentation features of descriptive video that can be ported to the world of the NII are ready to go.
Therefore, the lessons to be learned from descriptive video's early days as a new form of access to electronic communications include the fact that presentation standards and guidelines are best developed in a centralized fashion as the medium is developed. In addition, it's important to note that the slow growth of descriptive video is partially due to the fact that it is considered an add-on adaptation or retrofit, not an integral part of the source material. And third, it's vital to the successful development of access to NII content for people who are blind and visually impaired that careful analysis be made of the centralized production and funding mechanisms in place today and their applicability to tomorrow.
Work Begins
Stated simplistically, since the content of the NII is fully digital, it is the data structure of the content that must be designed to carry access capabilities and the producers of that data must provide their information in a multimodal format. Much has already been done to pave the way for such naturally accessible content. And much remains to be done.
The White House Tries It
For example, when the White House announced the launch of its World Wide Web home page, "the White House Tour," efforts were made to make the technology accessible to people who are deaf or blind. Audio clips of greetings from President Clinton, Vice President Gore, and even Socks the cat could be heard as well as read, by clicking on a "text" link (Socks' greeting was rendered as "meow" when clicked).
The graphically rich and elegant Home and subsequent pages could be turned into text for access by a blind-user's screen-reader, but the graphic images themselves were not described. Without much additional effort, such graphics, when created in the JPEG format, would have descriptions attached in a comment box that is scannable by screen readers.
Two Solutions Needed
As should be clear from this paper, two separate solutions are required when trying to make electronic communications accessible. First, the technology must be able to accommodate the alternate modes of presentation. And second, the common or standardized presentations of these alternate modes must be developed in order to facilitate understanding and acceptance of a common language.
Adapted Interactive Media
The best and most that can be borrowed from the electronic adaptations of the past (closed captioning and descriptive video) is the tried and true means of presenting the new text or audio to conversely provide access to the audio or pictures. The Adapted Interactive Media (AIM) project at the CPB/WGBH National Center for Accessible Media (NCAM) applied many of the rules of standard television closed captioning to the world on interactive videodisks. The project also made use of the additional capabilities of this combination analog and digital medium to create new approaches to making an interactive videodisk program accessible to students who are deaf or hard-of-hearing. The results of that project are available from NCAM as published guidelines.
The AIM project (which was prototyped on the Hypercard- and laser-disk-based Interactive NOVA product) experimented with standard television closed captions, analog sign language on the videodisk, digital sign language on the computer, two grade-levels of presentation of on-screen text for readers of differing skill levels, and an enhanced on-line glossary for reference.
The challenge of adapting the same product for students who are blind or visually impaired has yet to be met, though projects to attack just this issue have been proposed.
OS/2
IBM's operating system that forms the base for its multimedia (or Ultimedia as it is known in the OS/2 world) platform has already incorporated captioning as a system option. With the help of experts from the field of closed captioning, IBM devised a means of attaching synchronized text to audio emanating from the computer. Rudimentary guidelines for the use of this feature, based on televised closed captioning, have been published by IBM as well.
IBM has expressed interest in figuring out how to make the OS/2 and Ultimedia platforms accessible to people who are blind and visually impaired. Though attachment of sound files to various events occurring in the software is possible, the guidelines have not been devised for how and when and where to describe on-screen events and navigation through this multimedia world remains graphically inaccessible.
Digital Captioning
In the world of computer-based moving images, the attachment of text files which present the audio in a visual mode is technically quite feasible. On the Macintosh platform, the QuickTime standard's latest releases have included the ability to attach synchronized text to "movies" that contain audio. The addition of these text attributes is presently the responsibility of the programmer or creator of the movie file since a relatively high level of programming knowledge is necessary to accomplish this form of captioning.
Similarly, in Microsoft's Video for Windows, text can also be synchronized and made available to the user, again with the inclusion of these attributes in the hands of the originator of the content. This is indeed the model that should be used for the future of access to new electronic media that contains sound and pictures: inclusion of access features and content (captioning and/or description) should be enabled and included by and at the source of the media, not by third parties as an after-the- fact retrofit.
Professor Cindy King of Gallaudet University has been researching and developing innovative uses of captioning in fully digital environments. Her work in the educational field, particularly in the development of caption authoring tools for digital media, should be examined for applicability to the development of standards and guidelines for access to the NII for people deaf and hard- of-hearing.
Print Access: Newsline for the Blind
An innovative project developed as a partnership of the National Federation of the Blind, the CPB/WGBH National Center for Accessible Media (NCAM), and the USA Today newspaper may have relevance to furthering access to the NII for people who are print-disabled (i.e., people who are blind or visually impaired, have a learning disability, or who can't easily manipulate newspapers or other print material).
This is the "Newsline for the Blind," a phone-based technology that delivers the text of USA Today to registered blind viewers through speech synthesis (DEC Talk). With a system that leaves all the technology at the system operator's end, a user simply dials a phone number, enters an ID number and security code, and then is able to navigate around the sections, headlines, and stories in a daily newspaper by using the 12 touch-tone keypads on a standard telephone. The text itself is delivered via modem at 6am each day from USA Today's Virginia headquarters to NFB's Pentium computer in Baltimore. After some judicious data indexing, the newspaper becomes available via four phone lines in Baltimore (which become quickly overloaded at various times during the day).
The lesson here is that in the transition from today's information appliances (phones, modems, computers, radios, TV sets) to tomorrow's, there will be a period wherein the layman's technology will require the "intelligence to be in the network." That is, it will be a long while before sophisticated, high-end but user-friendly set-top boxes or smart phones are widely proliferated. In these intervening times, accessible media should be accommodated via the technology disabled users own and are comfortable with today.