News From Miami: NCI at the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Media Symposium

On February 13th, SyncWords and the National Captioning Institute were invited to the Telemundo Center in Miami to do a presentation on how to leverage machine translation for real-time broadcast, live OTT, and online meetings. The symposium was attended by hundreds of broadcast organizations looking to discover new innovations and use cases around cloud services offered by AWS. Lydy Pinzón-Dadley, the Director of Sales for NCI, illustrated...

2020: Closed Captioning Turns 40

NCI was excited to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the very first airing of closed captions on television! On March 16, 1980, “The Wonderful World of Disney” and “Masterpiece Theatre” were the first programs to air with closed captions, opening a new world of access for deaf and hard-of-hearing television viewers around the United States. The technology has changed, but NCI’s mission remains the...

The Frustrating Fight for Closed Captions on In-Flight Entertainment

Late last month Oscar-winning actress Marlee Matlin went viral on Twitter after calling out Delta for the lack of closed captions on her flight’s seat-back entertainment system. "Sad to see that my preferred airline, @Delta flight 1998 has provisions for various languages and audio description for in-flight entertainment but no closed captions for deaf and hard of hearing flyers," Matlin tweeted. The post has since received a million views and 48,000 likes.