National Association of the Deaf (NAD) commends the National Football League (NFL) and FOX Broadcasting Company for achieving a significant captioning milestone on February 6, 2011 by ensuring captioning commitments from all national commercials and promotions for Super Bowl XLV. For the first time ever for any television show, all national network promotions and all national commercials by the companies that bought advertising space were captioned. This milestone was facilitated by a FOX policy that required all Super Bowl XLV commercials come with caption files.
“While no law requires commercials or network promotions be captioned, the NAD advocates for full access to the entire television experience both on a voluntary basis and through new legislation. We applaud the extraordinary work of the NFL and FOX in getting all advertisers to agree to caption their commercials,” said NAD Civil Rights Committee Chair, Alexis Kashar. “The NAD will continue to work diligently on this important issue until the day Super Bowls are captioned from start to finish without exception.”
While this historic achievement is remarkable in many ways, the experience was not enjoyed by 100% of viewers who rely on captions. Three major barriers stand between the deaf and hard of hearing community and a truly 100% accessible Super Bowl experience: the full and complete pass-through of captioning to all television markets, high-quality captions, and captioning of local/regional advertisements. The NAD did not include local commercials in the count this year. We intend to pursue this goal with the NFL and next year’s broadcaster, NBC.
This conclusion was verified by the Super Bowl XLV Captioning Survey by the NAD and the Northern Virginia Resource Center for Deaf and Hard of Hearing Persons (NVRC). The survey found that at least one viewer saw a captioned version of each Super Bowl XLV commercial throughout the country. Where a person may not have seen captions in one household, others were able to see the captions with another television set. Various reasons can be attributed to the problems including, but not limited to, high definition/standard definition subscriptions, digital/analog television sets, local/regional broadcast stations, over-the-air/satellite/cable subscriptions, and set-top boxes. The NAD and NVRC will analyze the results further. Click here for a summary of the Super Bowl XLV Captioning Survey.
“The NFL and FOX did a phenomenal job. This milestone allows us to identify and move onto the next set of captioning challenges,” said NAD President Bobbie Beth Scoggins. “We truly appreciate the effort of the NFL and its broadcasting partners on their continued work with the NAD to raise the bar of accessibility at each Super Bowl.”