NAD And NVRC Ask You To Count Captioned Super Bowl Commercials

Super Bowls are renowned not only for the excitement of the game itself, but also for their legendary commercials. The National Association of the Deaf (NAD) and Northern Virginia Resource Center for Deaf and Hard of Hearing Persons (NVRC) are continuing their annual partnership to count closed captioned commercials this year for Super Bowl XLVI between the New England Patriots and New York Giants on Sunday, February 5, 2011 at 6:30 pm ET.

Individuals who are deaf or hard of hearing are among the more than 90 million viewers who make Super Bowl parties and game watching an annual tradition. Every year, we come closer to reaching our ideal of a fully captioned Super Bowl experience from beginning to end. 

Let’s continue our advocacy for a Super Bowl with super captions!

Join us in counting the commercials that have captions and reporting the ones that do not have captions. We recommend that you record Super Bowl XLVI on your DVR, VCR, or any other type of recording device if you have one. This will allow you to play back the video and check the accuracy of your count. You can also use the old standby of a pad and pen to write down the commercial and mark whether it was captioned as you sit in front of the television.

The NAD along with the National Football League (NFL) and NBC are continuing the effort to caption all national commercials and promotions prior to airing on February 5, 2012. Your caption counting efforts will help us to identify technical issues that may prevent captions from appearing on television sets.  You may also see some commercials that aren’t captioned because the commercials are local or regional rather than national.

The Super Bowl broadcast gives NAD and NVRC a great opportunity to learn if there are any problems with transmission of captions for the Super Bowl or the commercials and promotions. Please participate in the captioning monitoring effort this year to help the NAD and NVRC track these potential problems.

How to participate

After the Super Bowl, we will post a link to a survey on the NAD and NVRC websites for the captioning information. Use the information you gather from your DVRs or paper and pen to complete the survey. The survey will include all national commercials and promotions in the order that they appeared during Super Bowl. The survey will ask about each national commercial and whether or not it was captioned on your television set.  The survey will indicate the slots where local commercials were aired, and ask you to list what commercials you saw during that time and whether they were captioned.

The survey will also ask you for the following information: city and state where you watched the game on TV; whether you watched via cable, satellite, or antenna (and the name of your cable or satellite service); what brand and model TV you have (including whether it is analog or digital); and whether you watched the game in standard definition (SD) or high definition (HD).