ELECTRONICS : Latest Word in TVs Is Right on the Screen

If you’re planning to buy a television set with a screen larger than 13 inches, you’ll get a new feature.

CaptionVision, the feature that allows a set to display written captions of what’s being said on the screen, was mandated by Congress in all sets built after July 1. Designed to enable deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals to enjoy their favorite TV shows, legislators felt it was important enough to make all consumers pay for it.

But on-screen titling also holds potential benefits for those with normal hearing. Among them are using titles to teach preschoolers to learn to read, to help non-English speaking people to learn the language, to permit a viewer to follow a program’s action while vacuuming or even to watch late-night TV with the audio portion off so as not to disturb a sleeping mate.

With captioning, viewers receiving a phone call while a program is being telecast can mute the sound and continue to keep track of what’s happening on the screen while conversing with the caller.

Quite a bit of video fare is being captioned, including most network offerings, much of the programming on PBS stations, virtually all recent feature films and some sports events and local newscasts. The captions lurk in line 21 of the vertical blanking interval (the black bar that separates one video frame from the next) and emerge as a couple lines of text at the bottom of the TV picture.

But what if the captions are distracting and want to turn them off? Most sets will require the viewer to actively select the caption mode each time the set is turned on. Sony TVs will return to whatever mode they were in last when the set was turned off.

For those who don’t want a new set, stand-alone caption decoders are available from the National Captioning Institute for $50.