The National Institute on Deafness estimates that nearly three out of every 1,000 children in the U.S. are born with hearing loss in at least one ear (Boboltz, The Huffington Post). For many people radios and television screens give them the updates needed in life, but for people with partial or full hearing loss it can be hard to get this important information for themselves. They have had to rely on others to repeat this information. So in the mid 1970’s Bill Kastner invented closed captioning. Closed captions are words that appear at the bottom of your television that correlate with the words that are spoken on the screen. He came up with the new idea of closed captioning because he had a stuttering problem as a teenager and wanted people to be able to communicate better with the help of technology enhancements. He was intrigued with technologies such as radios and televisions so he decided to go to school for it. Soon after this he came up with a closed caption decoder box that would translate the spoken words into written words. Then the decoded microchip came out…show more content… This has given deaf people some of the same opportunities and enjoyment as the hearing people, as well as an easy device to use, but the invention by no means was full proof. At times the words would lag and other times they would not appear at all, which would cause confusion. This made it a lot harder for deaf people to keep up with the shows they were watching. On the other hand, it has saved them time and effort because they no longer have to lipread and guess what the television providers are saying. Allowing these people to have independent access to information even if they were out in public. Later the decoder chip was transmitted to the computers so that videos could be understood on more than the
