Closed Captioning Standards Development

Until the early 1990s, Canada's production industry could not produce closed captioned programming as part of the deliverables required by their broadcast licensing agreements.

Instead, producers sent out their finished programs to a handful of captioning services that provided closed captioning at a cost of $2,000 or more per hour. High costs limited the hours of closed captioned programming that broadcasters could offer.

Identifying this problem, and seeking to expand the quantity of accessible programming, the President and CEO of Media Access Canada (MAC), Beverley Milligan, commissioned the development of a qualitative standard and implementation guide for producing closed captioned programming. The Canadian Association of Broadcasters (CAB) granted Milligan the right to use the standard for the sole purpose of allowing its membership to be able to perform their closed captioning in-house. All remaining rights were retained by Media Access Canada (MAC), through Milligan.

CAB's joint societal committee then reviewed and adjusted the standard, making it the sole, voluntary closed-captioning production standard for the CAB's membership.When the CAB made the CAB/Media Access Canada (MAC) closed captioning guide public through its web site, and in tandem with other demand triggers, producers, broadcasters and entrepreneurs could finally control their costs for, and the quality of, accessible program content. In fact, they could now not just produce closed captioning themselves, but they could also offer captioning services to others.

Creating more suppliers in the Canadian accessible media production industry reduced closed captioning costs by 80%. Today closed captioning production costs range from $120 per hour to $400 per hour. The 80% cost savings permitted more programs to be captioned, making these more accessible to Canadians. While maintaining this standard for both official languages is now part of a CRTC-funded priority, as set out in CRTC Public Notice 2009-430, Media Access Canada (MAC)'s creation of the best practices guide and standard for closed captioning was critical to the successful policy and development of accessible media today.The CAB/Media Access Canada (MAC) standard is currently being updated using a consensus-based approach, and will be available to the public for feedback, before it is published in the fall of 2011.