Bryan Gould, Director of GBH’s National Center for Accessible Media (NCAM), recently appeared on a Facebook Live with CBS Sunday Morning’s David Pogue to discuss GBH’s innovative Descriptive Video Service. While Bryan was providing background on GBH’s long history of making media accessible to all, David was surprised to learn that broadcast captioning was invented by GBH. “You guys started that?!” He asked. Bryan confirmed that broadcast captions, which assist people who are deaf or hard of hearing by displaying the text of dialogue and other audio elements of a program, were in fact invented at GBH in 1972. He went on to discuss GBH’s Descriptive Video Service, the visual counterpart to closed captioning, which provides audio descriptions of the visual elements happening on- screen for people who are blind or visually impaired. To learn more, check out Bryan and David’s interview above (or watch on Facebook here).
