How Closed Captioning in the U.S. Today can Become the Advanced Television Captioning System of Tomorrow

The North American closed-captioning system has opened the world of television to millions of deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers. Soon, with the implementation of the Television Decoder Circuitry Act, closed captions will become commonplace in U.S. homes. The current system for delivering NTSC closed captions is economical and reliable, but many improvements are needed. The next standard for program-related data should be an open, flexible, and international architecture for the enrichment of video programming through captioning, subtitling, and other services, with character sets to accommodate as many alphabets and languages as possible and enough bandwidth to serve multiple needs simultaneously.