After two-and-a-half years of TV captioning for the deaf, how do we rate? Elsa Semmelink reports
This month it will be two-and-a-half years since the former NNTV introduced the SABC’s first half-hour magazine programme for the deaf, but some people within the corporation feel South Africa still lags far behind international broadcasters.
Sign Hear! was the first deaf programme launched on South African television, followed by Signing Power and The Shakies, which all aimed to cater for more than four million deaf and hard of hearing viewers.
“The international exposure South Africa has received since we started developing programmes for the deaf has proved that we are on a par with the rest of the world as far as our dedicated programmes are concerned. However, when it comes to captioning, we don’t feature at all. Since television is made accessible to the deaf primarily by captioning, this issue requires urgent attention in this country,” says SABC television programme co-ordinator for the deaf, Iris Bester.
She explains that television programmes other than those dedicated to the particular interests and needs of the deaf are made accessible to them by using different methods.
Captioning, also known as sub-titling, is the most common. In open caption programmes, the text appears on the screen, but in closed caption programmes, which are more widely used, hidden data is embedded in a TV programme.
A decoder box — similar to a M-Net decoder, but much smaller — has to be attached to a TV set for the viewer to see the captions.
Real time or live captioning, in which case information is made accessible to the deaf by using a sign language interpreter, is mostly used for news bulletins and live broadcasts.
“The deaf have basically the same requirements as hearing viewers,” Bester says. “As regards language preference, however, the deaf have indicated that sign language is their first language. When a second language is learned, it will be either English or Afrikaans. However, most black deaf people approached by SABC TV have indicated that they do not require captions in vernacular languages, but would prefer English, since it is regarded as the language of education.”
Last year Bester attended the 12th World Congress of the World Federation of the Deaf in Vienna, Austria, and the 18th International Congress on Education of the Deaf in Tel-Aviv, Israel and found that as far as captioning is concerned, South Africa is being left behind.
In the US, for example, which has more than 24- million people with hearing impairments — the federal government established the National Captioning Institute in 1979 as a non-profit corporation to develop closed captioning technology and programming.
It also supports legislation for more captioned programming and decoder subsidies; provides public relations and advertising support to increase public awareness; secures government grants to provide funding for captioned programming; and conducts research on the benefits of closed captioning as an educational tool.
During the 1992/1993 television season, NCI captions were seen on more than 770 hours of programming including programmes well-known to South African viewers such as LA Law, National Geographic specials, Loving, The Bold and the Beautiful, Garfield and Friends and Batman, the animated series.
Australia, likewise, established a non-governmental, self-supporting, non-profit company, the Australian Caption Centre, in 1981, and its first programmes with captions went on air the following year.
In Britain, subtitling is funded by the BBC licence fee, and the BBC broadcasts about 75 hours of programming with subtitles each week, which includes drama, documentaries, comedy features, consumer programmes, films, children’s programmes, news bulletins and current affairs, whereas Japan, a country with 400 000 deaf and two million hard-of- hearing, has 12 hours and 50 minutes of programmes for the deaf using sign language every week.
Legislation played a major part in captioning being used far more extensively in other countries than in South Africa. In terms of the UK’s Broadcast Act of 1990, 50% of all programmes on independent channels must be subtitled by 1998.
The US has no legislation pertaining to the number of programmes that have to be captioned, but the Public Broadcasting Service captions virtually all its programmes, and all programmes made by the federal government are captioned.
According to Bester, preliminary research done in the US has shown that the literacy skills of those learning English as a second language might be improved with exposure to captioned television programmes.
“In addition, closed captioning is one of the most important developments this century in bringing deaf and hard-of-hearing people into the mainstream,” she says.