International Captioning Project
Long-term Recommendations
The issue of total, viewer-selectable access is achievable in the long term. Successful fulfillment of NCAM's long-term recommendations will require a leadership presence in the global marketplace for programming, a commitment to setting and disseminating technical standards for access technologies and data exchange, and the ability to organize the cooperation of service providers, hardware and software manufacturers, and the global television industry.
- A meeting of caption and subtitle providers worldwide should be convened to discuss the creation of data which conforms to an agreed-upon technical standard. This software would address all broadcast formats and allow for the creation of captions and subtitles in all languages and character sets.
- New technology should allow multi-lingual captions or subtitles to be transmitted slowly enough to be recordable on the inexpensive, consumer- grade equipment prevalent around the world, yet fast enough to accommodate special features (such as the use of Asian-language character sets or icons).
- Technology needs to be developed to prevent the video-standard conversion process from destroying closed-caption or subtitle data already encoded in the VBI.
- Software needs to be developed to translate captions or subtitle files from one language to another with a minimum of human intervention, thus allowing for easy and efficient sharing of data between countries with different languages. (The time saved with this technology alone could, for example, be put to use to enlarge the worldwide audience for the program.) At the very least, existing captions should be used a source file for translation.
- The issue of audio dubbing vs. text subtitling should be examined to see if there are countries which prefer the one to the other, or even that both be available on any given program. Dubbing may be a more viable method of providing access in countries with low literacy rates, or where a certain percentage of imported programming is required to be dubbed. Technological limitations may also play a role here, as dubbing requires no special capability in order to be broadcast or received, whereas closed captions or subtitles do.
Public television is perfectly suited to play a leadership role in such a campaign and NCAM may be the appropriate organization to coordinate the development effort. NCAM already has relationships worldwide with all the major captioning agencies, as well as all hardware and software manufacturers through its work with the Television Data Systems Subcommittee of the Electronic Industries Association. Throughout the last three years of development of standards for the Television Decoder Circuitry Act, and the formation of the Advanced Television Closed Captioning Working Group, NCAM has played a key role as a nonpartisan proponent of openly available and widely distributed technical standards. Further research, development and testing are definitely warranted as a step towards a universal system for the international exchange of program-related language data. This research should be directed towards achieving NCAM's recommended goals.
