Captioning Gets a Regular Role on TV : Television: Federal law takes effect Thursday requiring sets 13 inches or larger to have built-in subtitle capability.

Starting this week, purchasers of new TV sets will have another technological feature available to them: Reading television will be as easy as a flip of the switch.

A federal law that takes effect Thursday requires television manufacturers to equip all new sets 13 inches or larger with built-in capability to display captions, or subtitles, if the viewer wants them. For the last 13 years, viewers had to purchase a special decoding device that attached to the set to get access to the captions, which program producers pay to have scrambled into the TV signal.

The technology originally was developed to enable the nation’s 24 million deaf and hearing-impaired people to enjoy television by putting subtitles on the screen that they could read to know what the character, narrator, journalist or announcer was saying.

But the new law also has enormous potential benefits for many viewers whose hearing is fine. For some, it might be as simple as making it possible to watch television in a noisy setting such as a bar or an airport, or when someone else is sleeping in the same room. And for the estimated 30 million immigrants learning English, the 27 million illiterate adults and the 12 million schoolchildren learning to read, captioning could turn TV into a free, 24-hour classroom.

“This is a major milestone in television,” said Gerald Dominick, chairman of the captioning issues committee for the Greater Los Angeles Assn. of the Deaf.

About 40% of all decoders sold in the last few years went to non-English speakers trying to learn the language, said Debra Davis Povar of the National Captioning Institute, which places captions in programs. Suddenly, the image of Daryl Hannah watching television to learn English in the 1984 mermaid movie “Splash” doesn’t seem so strange.

Experiments in captioning started in the early 1970s, but it was not until 1980 that the National Captioning Institute brought the technology of “closed captioning”--which hid the subtitles from anyone who didn’t want to see them--to the deaf and hearing-impaired on “The Wonderful World of Disney” and “Masterpiece Theatre.” Today, nearly all of network and PBS prime-time shows are captioned, as are more than 250 hours a week of cable programming and about 4,500 home videos.

With the implementation of the Television Decoder Circuitry Act, passed in 1990, viewers will no longer be required to purchase costly decoders (between $130 to $240) to enjoy these programs, nor will they be confined to their homes for captioned entertainment. Almost any new TV set purchased in the United States will have the decoding circuitry built in, with activation as simple as the push of a button.

“Television is a great common denominator; it reaches everyone,” Povar said. “Can you imagine if half the adult illiterate population could learn to read in the privacy of their own homes?”

Milton Goldman can. The Hamilton High School teacher has been using captioned television in his classroom for seven years and has witnessed the results firsthand.

Goldman shows the first few minutes of popular youth-oriented programs such as “The Cosby Show” to his English-as-a-second-language and remedial reading classes with the sound on. Just when the students get hooked into the story, he turns the sound off and switches to captions, challenging them to follow the plot by reading.

*

Their progress has made a believer out of Goldman. “I’ve got videotapes of my kids when I’m teaching a class, and when that sound goes off, you can see the concentration on their faces,” he said. “(Captioning) is a sure-fire motivator: The kids want to know what happens.”

Caption-display-capable television sets are already available from some manufacturers, and most retailers should have the line of new sets in stock by the fall. While the $5 to $20 cost of adding the feature may be passed along to consumers as price increases in some cases, an industry spokeswoman cautioned that buyers should not assume the worst.

“In many cases, (captioning) will just be a gift to the American people,” said Cynthia Upson, vice president for the Electronic Industries Assn.’s consumer electronics group.