Closed captioning - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Closed captioning is the process of displaying text

Written language

A written language is the representation of a language by means of a writing system. Written language is an invention in that it must be taught to children, who will instinctively learn or create spoken or gestural languages....

on a television

Television

Television is a telecommunication medium for transmitting and receiving moving images that can be monochrome or colored, with accompanying sound...

, video

Video

Video is the technology of electronically capturing, recording, processing, storing, transmitting, and reconstructing a sequence of still images representing scenes in motion.- History :...

screen

Display device

A display device is an output device for presentation of information in visual or tactile form...

or other visual display to provide additional or interpretive information to individuals who wish to access it. Closed captions typically show a transcription

Transcription (linguistics)

Transcription in the linguistic sense is the systematic representation of language in written form. The source can either be utterances or preexisting text in another writing system, although some linguists only consider the former as transcription.Transcription should not be confused with...

of the audio

Sound

Sound is a mechanical wave that is an oscillation of pressure transmitted through a solid, liquid, or gas, composed of frequencies within the range of hearing and of a level sufficiently strong to be heard, or the sensation stimulated in organs of hearing by such vibrations.-Propagation of...

portion of a program

Television program

A television program , also called television show, is a segment of content which is intended to be broadcast on television. It may be a one-time production or part of a periodically recurring series...

as it occurs (either verbatim or in edited form), sometimes including non-speech elements.

Terminology

The term "closed" in closed captioning indicates that not all viewers see the captions—only those who choose to decode or activate them. This distinguishes from "open captions" (sometimes called "burned-in" or "hardcoded" captions), which are visible to all viewers.

Most of the world does not distinguish captions from subtitles

Subtitle (captioning)

Subtitles are textual versions of the dialog in films and television programs, usually displayed at the bottom of the screen. They can either be a form of written translation of a dialog in a foreign language, or a written rendering of the dialog in the same language, with or without added...

. In the United States

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

and Canada

Canada

Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...

, these terms do have different meanings, however: "subtitles" assume the viewer can hear but cannot understand the language or accent, or the speech is not entirely clear, so they only transcribe dialogue and some on-screen text. "Captions" aim to describe to the deaf and hard of hearing all significant audio content—spoken dialogue and non-speech information such as the identity of speakers and, occasionally, their manner of speaking—along with music

Music

Music is an art form whose medium is sound and silence. Its common elements are pitch , rhythm , dynamics, and the sonic qualities of timbre and texture...

or sound effect

Sound effect

For the album by The Jam, see Sound Affects.Sound effects or audio effects are artificially created or enhanced sounds, or sound processes used to emphasize artistic or other content of films, television shows, live performance, animation, video games, music, or other media...

s using words or symbols.

The United Kingdom

United Kingdom

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

, Ireland

Republic of Ireland

Ireland , described as the Republic of Ireland , is a sovereign state in Europe occupying approximately five-sixths of the island of the same name. Its capital is Dublin. Ireland, which had a population of 4.58 million in 2011, is a constitutional republic governed as a parliamentary democracy,...

, and most other countries do not distinguish between subtitles and closed captions, and use "subtitles" as the general term—the equivalent of "captioning" is usually referred to as "Subtitles for the hard of hearing". Their presence is referenced on screen by notation which says "Subtitles", or previously "Subtitles 888" or just "888" (the latter two are in reference to the conventional teletext

Teletext

Teletext is a television information retrieval service developed in the United Kingdom in the early 1970s. It offers a range of text-based information, typically including national, international and sporting news, weather and TV schedules...

channel for captions).

Application

Closed captions were created for the deaf community or hard of hearing

Hearing impairment

-Definition:Deafness is the inability for the ear to interpret certain or all frequencies of sound.-Environmental Situations:Deafness can be caused by environmental situations such as noise, trauma, or other ear defections...

individuals to assist in comprehension. They can also be used as a tool by those learning to read, learning to speak a non-native language, or in an environment where the audio is difficult to hear or is intentionally muted. Captions can also be used by viewers who simply wish to read a transcript along with the program audio.

In the United States, the National Captioning Institute

National Captioning Institute

The National Captioning Institute is a non-profit organization that provides closed captioning for television and films. Created in 1979 and headquartered in Vienna, Virginia, the organization was the first to caption live TV and home video, and holds the trademark on the display icon featuring a...

noted that English as a foreign or second language (ESL) learners were the largest group buying decoders in the late 1980s and early 1990s before built-in decoders became a standard feature of US television sets. This suggested that the largest audience of closed captioning was people whose native language was not English. In the United Kingdom, of 7.5 million people using TV subtitles (closed captioning), 6 million have no hearing impairment.

Closed captions are also used in public environments, such as bars and restaurants, where patrons may not be able to hear over the background noise, or where multiple televisions are displaying different programs.

Some television sets can be set to automatically turn captioning on when the volume is muted.

Television and video

For live programs, spoken words comprising the television program's soundtrack

Soundtrack

A soundtrack can be recorded music accompanying and synchronized to the images of a motion picture, book, television program or video game; a commercially released soundtrack album of music as featured in the soundtrack of a film or TV show; or the physical area of a film that contains the...

are transcribed by a human operator (a Speech-to-text reporter

Speech-to-Text Reporter

This article is about Speech-to-Text Reporters who are human beings reproducing speech into a text format onto a computer screen at verbatim speeds for deaf or hard of hearing people to read...

) using stenotype

Stenotype

A stenotype, stenotype machine or shorthand machine is a specialized chorded keyboard or typewriter used by stenographers for shorthand use...

or stenomask

Stenomask

A stenomask is a mouth mask with a built-in microphone. The purpose of a stenomask is to allow a person to speak without being heard by other people, and to keep background noise away from the microphone....

type of machines, whose phonetic output is instantly translated into text by a computer and displayed on the screen. This technique was developed in the 1970s as an initiative of the BBC

BBC

The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...

's Ceefax

Ceefax

Ceefax is the BBC's teletext information service transmitted via the analogue signal, started in 1974 and will run until April 2012 for Pages from Ceefax, while the actual interactive service will run until 24 October 2012, in-line with the digital switchover.-History:During the late 60s, engineer...

teletext

Teletext

service. In collaboration with the BBC, a university student took on the research project of writing the first phonetics-to-text conversion program for this purpose. Sometimes, the captions of live broadcasts, like news bulletins, sports events, live entertainment shows, and other live shows fall behind by a few seconds. This delay is because the machine does not know what the person is going to say next, so after the person on the show says the sentence, the captions appear. Automatic computer speech recognition now works well when trained to recognize a single voice, and so since 2003, the BBC does live subtitling by having someone re-speak what is being broadcast. Live captioning is also a form of real-time text

Real-time text

Real-time text is streaming text that is continuously transmitted as it is typed or otherwise composed. It allows conversational use of text, where people interactively converse with each other.-Use over instant messaging:...

.

In some cases, the transcript is available beforehand and captions are simply displayed during the program after being edited. For programs that have a mix of pre-prepared and live content, such as news bulletins, a combination of the above techniques is used.

For prerecorded programs, commercials, and home videos, audio is transcribed and captions are prepared, positioned, and timed in advance.

For all types of NTSC

NTSC

NTSC, named for the National Television System Committee, is the analog television system that is used in most of North America, most of South America , Burma, South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, the Philippines, and some Pacific island nations and territories .Most countries using the NTSC standard, as...

programming, captions are "encoded" into Line 21

EIA-608

EIA-608, also known as line 21 captions, used to be the standard for closed captioning for NTSC TV broadcasts in the United States and Canada...

of the vertical blanking interval

Vertical blanking interval

The vertical blanking interval , also known as the vertical interval or VBLANK, is the time difference between the last line of one frame or field of a raster display, and the beginning of the first line of the next frame. It is present in analog television, VGA, DVI and other signals. During the...

– a part of the TV picture that sits just above the visible portion and is usually unseen. For ATSC (digital television

Digital television

Digital television is the transmission of audio and video by digital signals, in contrast to the analog signals used by analog TV...

) programming, three streams are encoded in the video: two are backward compatible Line 21 captions, and the third is a set of up to 63 additional caption streams encoded in EIA-708

EIA-708

CEA-708 is the standard for closed captioning for ATSC digital television streams in the United States and Canada. It was developed by the Electronic Industries Alliance.Unlike most DVB captions, CEA-708 captions are textual like traditional Line 21 captions...

format.

Captioning is transmitted and stored differently in PAL

PAL

PAL, short for Phase Alternating Line, is an analogue television colour encoding system used in broadcast television systems in many countries. Other common analogue television systems are NTSC and SECAM. This page primarily discusses the PAL colour encoding system...

and SECAM

SECAM

SECAM, also written SÉCAM , is an analog color television system first used in France....

countries, where teletext

Teletext

is used rather than Line 21, but the methods of preparation are similar. For home videotapes, a variation of the Line 21 system is used in PAL countries. Teletext captions can't be stored on a standard VHS tape (due to limited bandwidth), although they are available on S-VHS

S-VHS

S-VHS is an improved version of the VHS standard for consumer-level analog recording videocassettes. It was introduced by JVC in Japan in April 1987 with the HR-S7000 VCR and certain overseas markets soon afterwards...

tapes and DVDs.

For older televisions, a set-top box or other decoder is usually required. In the US, since the passage of the Television Decoder Circuitry Act, manufacturers of most television receivers sold have been required to include closed captioning display capability. High-definition TV sets, receivers, and tuner cards

TV tuner card

A TV tuner card is a kind of television tuner that allows television signals to be received by a computer. Most TV tuners also function as video capture cards, allowing them to record television programs onto a hard disk much like the Tivo digital video recorder does.-Variants: The interfaces for...

are also covered, though the technical specifications are different. (High-definition display screens, as opposed to high-definition TVs, may lack captioning.) Canada has no similar law, but receives the same sets as the US in most cases.

There are three styles of Line 21 closed captioning:

Roll-up or scroll-up or scrolling: The words appear from left to right, up to one line at a time; when a line is filled, the whole line scrolls up to make way for a new line, and the line on top is erased. The captions usually appear at the bottom of the screen, but can actually be placed anywhere to avoid covering graphics or action. This method is used for live events, where a sequential word-by-word captioning process is needed.

Pop-on or pop-up or block: A caption appears anywhere on the screen as a whole, followed by another caption or no captions. This method is used for most pre-taped television and film programming. One error for some programs that use this style is a white space will appear at the beginning of the program. Another is when the screen momentarily will, as if it was the "roll up" style, type random letters on screen, and then revert back to normal. Also, the capitalization varies based on the caption provider. Though most of the time the words are all capitalized, some caption providers will have capital and lower case letters.

Example:

(Man) I GOT THE MACHINE READY. (engine starting)
A single program may include scroll-up and pop-on captions (e.g., scroll-up for narration

Narrator

A narrator is, within any story , the fictional or non-fictional, personal or impersonal entity who tells the story to the audience. When the narrator is also a character within the story, he or she is sometimes known as the viewpoint character. The narrator is one of three entities responsible for...

and pop-on for song lyrics). A musical note symbol (sharp sign in UK, Ireland and Australia) is used to indicate song lyrics

Lyrics

Lyrics are a set of words that make up a song. The writer of lyrics is a lyricist or lyrist. The meaning of lyrics can either be explicit or implicit. Some lyrics are abstract, almost unintelligible, and, in such cases, their explication emphasizes form, articulation, meter, and symmetry of...

or background music. Generally, lyrics are preceded and followed by music notes (or hash signs), while song titles are bracketed like a sound effect. Standards vary from country to country and company to company.

For live programs, some soap opera

Soap opera

A soap opera, sometimes called "soap" for short, is an ongoing, episodic work of dramatic fiction presented in serial format on radio or as television programming. The name soap opera stems from the original dramatic serials broadcast on radio that had soap manufacturers, such as Procter & Gamble,...

s, and other shows captioned using scroll-up, Line 21 caption text include the symbols '>>' to indicate a new speaker (the name of the new speaker sometimes appears as well), and '>>>' in news reports to identify a new story. In some cases, '>>' means one person is talking and '>>>' means two or more people are talking. Capitals are frequently used because many older home caption decoder fonts had no descender

Descender

In typography, a descender is the portion of a letter that extends below the baseline of a font. The line that descenders reach down to is known as the beard line....

s for the lowercase letters g, j, p, q, and y, though virtually all modern TVs have caption character sets with descenders. Text can be italicized

Italic type

In typography, italic type is a cursive typeface based on a stylized form of calligraphic handwriting. Owing to the influence from calligraphy, such typefaces often slant slightly to the right. Different glyph shapes from roman type are also usually used—another influence from calligraphy...

, among a few other style choices. Captions can be presented in different colors as well. Coloration is rarely used in North America, but can sometimes be seen on music videos on MTV

MTV

MTV, formerly an initialism of Music Television, is an American network based in New York City that launched on August 1, 1981. The original purpose of the channel was to play music videos guided by on-air hosts known as VJs....

or VH-1, and in the captioning's production credits. More often, coloration is used in the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia

Australia

Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...

and New Zealand for speaker differentiation.

There were many shortcomings in the original Line 21 specification from a typographic

Typography

Typography is the art and technique of arranging type in order to make language visible. The arrangement of type involves the selection of typefaces, point size, line length, leading , adjusting the spaces between groups of letters and adjusting the space between pairs of letters...

standpoint, since, for example, it lacked many of the characters required for captioning in languages other than English. Since that time, the core Line 21 character set has been expanded to include quite a few more characters, handling most requirements for languages common in North and South America such as French

French language

French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...

, Spanish

Spanish language

Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...

, and Portuguese

Portuguese language

Portuguese is a Romance language that arose in the medieval Kingdom of Galicia, nowadays Galicia and Northern Portugal. The southern part of the Kingdom of Galicia became independent as the County of Portugal in 1095...

, though those extended characters are not required in all decoders and are thus unreliable in everyday use. The problem has been almost eliminated with the EIA-708

EIA-708

standard for digital television, which boasts a far more comprehensive character set.

Captions are often edited to make them easier to read and to reduce the amount of text displayed onscreen. This editing can be very minor, with only a few occasional unimportant missed lines, to severe, where virtually every line spoken by the actors is condensed. The measure used to guide this editing is words per minute, commonly varying from 180 to 300, depending on the type of program. Offensive words are also captioned, but if the program is censored for TV broadcast, the broadcaster might not have arranged for the captioning to be edited or censored also. The "TV Guardian", a television

Television

Television is a telecommunication medium for transmitting and receiving moving images that can be monochrome or colored, with accompanying sound...

set top box, is available to parents who wish to censor offensive language of programs–the video signal is fed into the box and if it detects an offensive word in the captioning, the audio signal is bleeped or muted for that period of time.

Conversations

Software programs are now available that automatically generate a closed-captioning of conversations. Examples of such conversations include discussions in conference rooms, classroom lectures, and/or religious services.

Caption channels

The Line 21 data stream can consist of data from several data channels
multiplexed together. Field 1 has four data channels: two Captions (CC1, CC2)
and two Text (T1, T2). Field 2 has five additional data channels: two
Captions (CC3, CC4), two Text (T3, T4), and Extended Data Services

Extended Data Services

Extended Data Services , is an American standard classified under Electronic Industries Alliance standard CEA-608-E for the delivery of any ancillary data to be sent with an analog television program, or any other NTSC video signal.XDS is used by TV stations, TV networks, and TV program...

(XDS). XDS
data structure is defined in CEA–608.

As CC1 and CC2 share bandwidth, if there is a lot of data in CC1, there will be little room for CC2 data. Similarly CC3 and CC4 share the second field of line 21. Since some early caption decoders supported only CC1 and CC2, captions in a second language were often placed in CC2. This led to bandwidth problems, however, and the current U.S. Federal Communications Commission

Federal Communications Commission

The Federal Communications Commission is an independent agency of the United States government, created, Congressional statute , and with the majority of its commissioners appointed by the current President. The FCC works towards six goals in the areas of broadband, competition, the spectrum, the...

(FCC) recommendation is that bilingual programming should have the second caption language in CC3. Telemundo

Telemundo

Telemundo is an American television network that broadcasts in Spanish. The network is the second-largest Spanish-language content producer in the world, and the second-largest Spanish-language network in the United States, behind Univision....

, for example, provides English subtitles for many of its Spanish programs in CC3.

DVDs

NTSC DVDs may carry closed captions in data packets of the MPEG-2 video streams inside of the Video-TS folder. Once played out of the analog outputs of a set top DVD player, the caption data is converted to the Line 21 format. They are sent to the TV by the player and can be displayed with a TV's built-in decoder or a set-top decoder as usual. When viewed on a personal computer, caption data can be viewed by software that can read and decode the caption data packets in the MPEG-2 streams of the DVD-Video disc. Both Windows Media Player (before Windows 7) and Apple's DVD Player have the ability to read and decode caption data.

In addition to Line 21 closed captions, video DVDs may also carry subtitles as a bitmap overlay which can be turned on and off via a set top DVD player or DVD player software, just like captions. This type of captioning is usually carried in a subtitle track labeled either "English for the hearing impaired" or, more recently, "SDH" (Subtitled for the Deaf and Hard of hearing). Many popular Hollywood DVD-Videos can carry both subtitles and closed captions (see Stepmom DVD by Columbia Pictures). On some DVDs, the Line 21 captions may contain the same text as the subtitles; on others, only the Line 21 captions include the additional non-speech information (even sometimes song lyrics) needed for deaf and hard of hearing viewers. European Region 2 DVDs do not carry Line 21 captions, and instead list the subtitle languages available—English is often listed twice, one as the representation of the dialogue alone, and a second subtitle set which carries additional information for the deaf and hard of hearing audience. (Many deaf/HOH subtitle files on DVDs are reworkings of original teletext subtitle files.)

HD DVD

HD DVD

HD DVD is a discontinued high-density optical disc format for storing data and high-definition video.Supported principally by Toshiba, HD DVD was envisioned to be the successor to the standard DVD format...

and Blu-ray disc

Blu-ray Disc

Blu-ray Disc is an optical disc storage medium designed to supersede the DVD format. The plastic disc is 120 mm in diameter and 1.2 mm thick, the same size as DVDs and CDs. Blu-ray Discs contain 25 GB per layer, with dual layer discs being the norm for feature-length video discs...

media cannot carry Line 21 closed captioning due to the design of High-Definition Multimedia Interface

High-Definition Multimedia Interface

HDMI is a compact audio/video interface for transmitting uncompressed digital data. It is a digital alternative to consumer analog standards, such as radio frequency coaxial cable, composite video, S-Video, SCART, component video, D-Terminal, or VGA...

(HDMI) specifications that were designed to replace older analog and digital standards, such as VGA, S-Video, and DVI. Both Blu-ray disc and HD DVD can use either PNG bitmap subtitles or 'advanced subtitles' to carry SDH type subtitling, the latter being an XML based textual format which includes font, styling and positioning information as well as a unicode representation of the text. Advanced subtitling can also include additional media accessibility features such as "descriptive audio".

Movies

There are several competing technologies used to provide captioning for movies in theaters. Cinema captioning falls into the categories of 'open' and 'closed.' The definition of "closed" captioning in this context is different from television, as it refers to any technology that allows as few as one member of the audience to view the captions.

Open captioning in a film theater can be accomplished through burned-in captions, projected text or bitmaps, or (rarely) a display located above or below the movie screen. Typically, this display is a large LED sign. In a digital theater, open caption display capability is built into the digital projector. Closed caption capability is also available, with the ability for 3rd party closed caption devices to plug into the digital cinema server.

Probably the best-known closed captioning option for film theaters is the Rear Window Captioning System

Rear Window Captioning System

The Rear Window captioning system is a method for presenting, through captions, a transcript of the audio portion of a film in theatres for deaf and hard-of-hearing people. The system was co-developed by WGBH and Rufus Butler Seder....

from the National Center for Accessible Media. Upon entering the theater, viewers requiring captions are given a panel of flat translucent glass or plastic on a gooseneck stalk, which can be mounted in front of the viewer's seat. In the back of the theater is an LED

LEd

LEd is a TeX/LaTeX editing software working under Microsoft Windows. It is a freeware product....

display that shows the captions in mirror image. The panel reflects captions for the viewer, but is nearly invisible to surrounding patrons. The panel can be positioned so that the viewer watches the movie through the panel and captions appear either on or near the movie image. A company called Cinematic Captioning Systems has a similar reflective system called Bounce Back. A major problem for distributors has been that these systems are each proprietary, and require separate distributions to the theater to enable them to work. Proprietary systems also incur license fees.

For film projection systems, Digital Theater Systems, the company behind the DTS surround sound

Surround sound

Surround sound encompasses a range of techniques such as for enriching the sound reproduction quality of an audio source with audio channels reproduced via additional, discrete speakers. Surround sound is characterized by a listener location or sweet spot where the audio effects work best, and...

standard, has created a digital captioning device called the DTS-CSS or Cinema Subtitling System. It is a combination of a laser projector which places the captioning (words, sounds) anywhere on the screen and a thin playback device with a CD that holds many languages. If the Rear Window Captioning System is used, the DTS-CSS player is also required for sending caption text to the Rear Window sign located in the rear of the theater.

Special effort has been made to build accessibility features into digital projection systems (see digital cinema

Digital cinema

Digital cinema refers to the use of digital technology to distribute and project motion pictures. A movie can be distributed via hard drives, optical disks or satellite and projected using a digital projector instead of a conventional film projector...

). Through SMPTE, standards now exist that dictate how open and closed captions, as well as hearing-impaired and visually impaired narrative audio, are packaged with the rest of the digital movie. This eliminates the proprietary caption distributions required for film, and the associated royalties. SMPTE has also standardized the communication of closed caption content between the digital cinema server and 3rd party closed caption systems (the CSP/RPL protocol). As a result, new, competitive closed caption systems for digital cinema are now emerging that will work with any standards-compliant digital cinema server. These newer closed caption devices include cup-holder-mounted electronic displays and wireless glasses which display caption text in front of the wearer's eyes. Bridge devices are also available to enable the use of Rear Window systems. As of mid-2010, the remaining challenge to the wide introduction of accessibility in digital cinema is the industry-wide transition to SMPTE DCP, the standardized packaging method for very high quality, secure distribution of digital movies.

Video games

Closed captioning of video games is becoming more common. One of the first video games to feature true closed captioning was Zork Grand Inquisitor

Zork Grand Inquisitor

Zork: Grand Inquisitor is a graphical adventure game, developed by Activision and released in 1997 for the IBM compatible PC and Macintosh . It builds upon the Zork and Enchanter series of interactive fiction computer games originally released by Infocom. The cast includes Erick Avari, Dirk...

in 1997. Many games since then have at least offered subtitles for spoken dialog during cut scenes, and many include significant in-game dialog and sound effects in the captions as well; for example, with subtitles turned on in the Metal Gear Solid

Metal Gear Solid

is a videogame by Hideo Kojima. The game was developed by Konami Computer Entertainment Japan and first published by Konami in 1998 for the PlayStation video game console. It is the sequel to Kojimas early MSX2 computer games Metal Gear and Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake...

series of stealth games, not only are subtitles available during cut scenes, but any dialog spoken during real-time gameplay will be captioned as well, allowing players who can't hear the dialog to know what enemy guards are saying and when the main character has been detected. Also, in many of developer Valve's video games (such as Half-Life 2
Half-Life 2
Half-Life 2 , the sequel to Half-Life, is a first-person shooter video game and a signature title in the Half-Life series. It is singleplayer, story-driven, science fiction, and linear...

or Left 4 Dead
Left 4 Dead
Left 4 Dead is a cooperative first-person shooter video game. It was developed by Turtle Rock Studios, which was purchased by Valve Corporation during development. The game uses Valve's proprietary Source engine, and is available for Microsoft Windows, Xbox 360 and Mac OS X...

), when closed captions are activated, dialog and nearly all sound effects either made by the player or from other sources (e.g. gunfire, explosions) will be captioned.

Video games don't offer Line 21 captioning, decoded and displayed by the television itself but rather a built-in subtitle display, more akin to that of a DVD. The game systems themselves have no role in the captioning either: each game must have its subtitle display programmed individually.

Reid Kimball, a game designer who is hearing impaired, is attempting to educate game developers about closed captioning for games. Reid started the Games[CC] group to closed caption games and serve as a research and development team to aid the industry. Kimball designed the Dynamic Closed Captioning system, writes articles, and speaks at developer conferences. Games[CC]'s first closed captioning project called Doom3[CC] was nominated for an award as Best Doom3 Mod of the Year for IGDA's Choice Awards 2006 show.

Online Video Streaming

Internet Video Streaming Service, YouTube

YouTube

YouTube is a video-sharing website, created by three former PayPal employees in February 2005, on which users can upload, view and share videos....

, offers captioning services in videos. The author of the video can upload a SubViewer (*.SUB), SubRip (*.SRT) or *.SBV file.
YouTube is currently testing an Automatic Caption Feature, which will transcribe audio and not require the author to add a captioning file. This feature was only available on certain videos, but now is available to all English videos. However, the automatic captioning is often inaccurate on videos with background music and exaggerated emotion in speaking. On June 30, 2010, YouTube announced a new "YouTube Ready" designation for professional caption vendors in the United States. The initial list included 12 companies who passed a caption quality evaluation administered by the Described and Captioned Media Project, have a website and a YouTube channel where customers can learn more about their services, and have agreed to post rates for the range of services that they offer for YouTube content.

Flash video also supports captions via the Distribution Exchange profile(DFXP)of W3C Timed Text

Timed Text

Timed Text refers to the presentation of text media in synchrony with other media, such as audio and video.Typical applications of timed text are the real time subtitling of foreign-language movies on the Web, captioning for people lacking audio devices or having hearing impairments, karaoke,...

format. The latest Flash authoring software adds free player skins and caption components that enable viewers to turn captions on/off during playback from a webpage. Previous versions of Flash relied on the Captionate 3rd party component and skin to caption Flash video. Custom Flash players designed in Flex can be tailored to support the Timed Text

Timed Text

exchange profile, Captionate .XML, or SAMI file (see Hulu captioning).

The Silverlight Media Framework. also includes support for the Timed Text

Timed Text

exchange profile for both download and adaptive streaming media.

Windows Media Video can support closed captions for both video on demand streaming or live streaming scenarios. Typically Windows Media captions support the SAMI file format but can also carry embedded closed caption data.

QuickTime video supports true 608 caption data via QuickTime's proprietary Closed Caption Track. These captions can be turned on and off and appear in the same style as TV closed captions with all the standard formatting (pop-on, roll-up, paint-on) and can be positioned and split anywhere on the video screen. QuickTime Closed Caption tracks can be viewed in Mac

Macintosh

The Macintosh , or Mac, is a series of several lines of personal computers designed, developed, and marketed by Apple Inc. The first Macintosh was introduced by Apple's then-chairman Steve Jobs on January 24, 1984; it was the first commercially successful personal computer to feature a mouse and a...

or Windows

Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...

versions of QuickTime Player

QuickTime

QuickTime is an extensible proprietary multimedia framework developed by Apple Inc., capable of handling various formats of digital video, picture, sound, panoramic images, and interactivity. The classic version of QuickTime is available for Windows XP and later, as well as Mac OS X Leopard and...

, iTunes

ITunes

iTunes is a media player computer program, used for playing, downloading, and organizing digital music and video files on desktop computers. It can also manage contents on iPod, iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad....

(via QuickTime), iPod Nano

IPod nano

iPod Nano is a digital media player designed and marketed by Apple Inc.. The first generation of iPod Nano was introduced on September 7, 2005 as a replacement for iPod Mini. It uses flash memory for storage. iPod Nano has gone through six models, or generations, since its introduction...

, iPod Classic

IPod classic

The iPod Classic is a portable media player marketed by Apple Inc...

, iPod Touch

IPod Touch

The iPod Touch is a portable media player, personal digital assistant, handheld game console, and Wi-Fi mobile device designed and marketed by Apple Inc. The iPod Touch adds the multi-touch graphical user interface to the iPod line...

, iPhone

IPhone

The iPhone is a line of Internet and multimedia-enabled smartphones marketed by Apple Inc. The first iPhone was unveiled by Steve Jobs, then CEO of Apple, on January 9, 2007, and released on June 29, 2007...

, and iPad

IPad

The iPad is a line of tablet computers designed, developed and marketed by Apple Inc., primarily as a platform for audio-visual media including books, periodicals, movies, music, games, and web content. The iPad was introduced on January 27, 2010 by Apple's then-CEO Steve Jobs. Its size and...

Theatre

Live plays can be open captioned by a captioner who displays lines from the script and including non-speech elements on a large display screen

Projection screen

A projection screen is an installation consisting of a surface and a support structure used for displaying a projected image for the view of an audience. Projection screens may be permanently installed, as in a movie theater; painted on the wall; or semi-permanent or mobile, as in a conference room...

near the stage.

Telephones

A captioned telephone (also called captioned relay or Cap-Tel) is a telephone

Telephone

The telephone , colloquially referred to as a phone, is a telecommunications device that transmits and receives sounds, usually the human voice. Telephones are a point-to-point communication system whose most basic function is to allow two people separated by large distances to talk to each other...

that displays real-time captions of the current conversation. The captions are typically displayed on a screen embedded into the telephone base.

Media monitoring services

In the United States especially, most media monitoring service

Media monitoring service

A media monitoring service, a press clipping service or a clipping service as known in earlier times, provides clients with copies of media content, which is of specific interest to them and subject to changing demand; what they provide may include documentation, content, analysis, or editorial...

s capture and index closed captioning text from news and public affairs programs, allowing them to search the text for client references. The use of closed captioning for television news monitoring was pioneered in 1993 by Tulsa-based NewsTrak of Oklahoma (later known as Broadcast News of Mid-America, acquired by video news release

Video news release

A video news release is a video segment made to look like a news report, but is instead created by a PR firm, advertising agency, marketing firm, corporation, or government agency. They are provided to television newsrooms to shape public opinion, promote commercial products and services,...

pioneer Medialink Worldwide Incorporated in 1997). US patent 7,009,657 describes a "method and system for the automatic collection and conditioning of closed caption text originating from multiple geographic locations" as used by news monitoring services.

Americas

The US ATSC HDTV system originally specified two different kinds of closed captioning datastream standards—the original (available by Line 21

EIA-608

EIA-608, also known as line 21 captions, used to be the standard for closed captioning for NTSC TV broadcasts in the United States and Canada...

) and another more modern version encoded in MPEG-2

MPEG-2

MPEG-2 is a standard for "the generic coding of moving pictures and associated audio information". It describes a combination of lossy video compression and lossy audio data compression methods which permit storage and transmission of movies using currently available storage media and transmission...

, the CEA-708 standard. The US FCC mandates that broadcasters deliver (and generate, if necessary) both datastream formats. The Canadian CRTC has not mandated that broadcasters either broadcast both datastream formats or exclusively in one format.

Incompatibility issues with HDTV

Many viewers find that when they switch to an HDTV they are unable to view closed caption (CC)
information, even though the broadcaster is sending it and the TV is able to display it.
Originally, CC information was included in the picture ("line 21"), but there is no equivalent capability in
the HDTV 720p/1080i interconnects between the display and a "source".
A "source", in this case, can be a DVD player or an HD tuner (a cable box is an HD tuner).
When CC information is encoded in the MPEG-2 data stream, only the device that decodes the MPEG-2 data
(a source) has access to the closed caption information; there is no standard for transmitting
the CC information to an HD display separately.
Thus, if there is CC information, the source device needs to overlay the CC information on the picture prior to transmitting to the display over the interconnect.

Many source devices do not have the ability to overlay CC information, or controlling the CC overlay is extremely complicated.
For example, the Motorola DCT-5xxx and -6xxx cable set-top boxes have the ability to decode CC information located on the mpg stream and overlay it on the picture, but turning CC on and off requires turning off the unit and going into a [//en.wikibooks.org/wiki/How_to_use_a_Motorola_DVR/Setup#Closed_Caption special setup menu] (it is not on the standard configuration menu and it cannot be controlled using the remote).
Historically, DVD players and cable box tuners did not need to do this overlaying, they simply passed this information on to the TV, and they are not mandated to perform this overlaying.

Many modern HDTVs can be directly connected to cables, but then they often cannot receive scrambled channels that the user is paying for. Thus, the lack of a standard way of sending CC information between components, along with the lack of a
mandate to add this information to a picture, results in CC being unavailable to many hard-of-hearing and deaf users.

Europe

The European teletext systems are the source for closed captioning signals, thus when teletext is embedded into DVB-T

DVB-T

DVB-T is an abbreviation for Digital Video Broadcasting — Terrestrial; it is the DVB European-based consortium standard for the broadcast transmission of digital terrestrial television that was first published in 1997 and first broadcast in the UK in 1998...

or DVB-S

DVB-S

DVB-S is an abbreviation for Digital Video Broadcasting — Satellite; it is the original Digital Video Broadcasting forward error coding and demodulation standard for satellite television and dates from 1994, in its first release, while development lasted from 1993 to 1997...

the closed captioning signal is included. However, for DVB-T and DVB-S, it is not necessary for a teletext page signal to also be present (ITV1

ITV1

ITV1 is a generic brand that is used by twelve franchises of the British ITV Network in the English regions, Wales, southern Scotland , the Isle of Man and the Bailiwicks of Jersey and Guernsey. The ITV1 brand was introduced by Carlton and Granada in 2001, alongside the regional identities of their...

, for example, does not carry analogue teletext signals on Sky Digital, but does carry the embedded version, accessible from the "Services" menu of the receiver, or more recently by turning them off/on from a mini menu accessible from the "help" button).

DTV standard captioning improvements

The CEA-708 specification provides for dramatically improved captioning

An enhanced character set with more accented letters and non-Latin letters, and more special symbols
Viewer-adjustable text size (called the "caption volume control" in the specification), allowing individuals to adjust their TVs to display small, normal, or large captions
More text and background colors, including both transparent and translucent backgrounds to optionally replace the big black block
More text styles, including edged or drop shadow
Drop shadow
In computer graphics, a drop shadow is a visual effect consisting of drawing that looks like the shadow of an object, giving the impression that the object is raised above the objects behind it. The drop shadow is often used for elements of a graphical user interface such as windows or menus, and...

ed text rather than the letters on a solid background
More text fonts, including monospaced and proportional spaced, serif and sans-serif, and some playful cursive fonts
Higher bandwidth, to allow more data per minute of video
More language channels, to allow the encoding of more independent caption streams

As of 2009, however, most closed captioning for DTV environments is done using tools designed for analog captioning (working to the CEA-608 NTSC spec rather than the CEA-708 DTV spec). The captions are then run through transcoders made by companies like EEG Enterprises or Evertz, which convert the analog Line 21 caption format to the digital format. This means that none of the CEA-708 features are used unless they were also contained in CEA-608.

Non-linear video editing systems and closed captioning

In April, 2010, Sony Creative Software

Sony Creative Software

Sony Creative Software is a subsidiary of Sony, focused primarily on their line of media production software...

released the Vegas Pro 9.0d update to the professional non-linear editor, Vegas Pro

Sony Vegas

Sony Vegas is a professional video editing software package for non-linear editing systems originally published by Sonic Foundry, now owned and run by Sony Creative Software. Originally developed as an audio editor, it eventually developed into an NLE for video and audio from version 2.0...

which implemented basic support for importing, editing, and delivering CEA608 Closed Captions. Vegas Pro 10, released on October 11, 2010, added several enhancements to the closed captioning support. TV-like CEA608 Closed Captioning can now be displayed as an overlay when played back in the Preview and Trimmer windows making it easy to check placement, edits, and timing of CC information. CEA708 style Closed Captioning is automatically created when the CEA608 data is created. Line 21 Closed Captioning is now supported as well as HD-SDI closed captioning capture and print from AJA and Blackmagic Design cards. Line 21 support provides a workflow for existing legacy media. Other improvements include increased support for multiple closed captioning file types, as well as the ability to export closed caption data for DVD Architect, YouTube, RealPlayer, QuickTime, and Windows Media Player.

In mid 2009, Apple released Final Cut Pro

Final Cut Pro

Final Cut Pro is a non-linear video editing software developed by Macromedia Inc. and then Apple Inc. The most recent version, Final Cut Pro X, runs on Mac personal computers powered by Mac OS X version 10.6.7 or later and using Intel processors...

version 7 and began support for inserting closed caption data into SD and HD tape masters via firewire and compatible video capture cards. Up until this time it was not possible for video editors to insert caption data with both CEA-608

EIA-608

EIA-608, also known as line 21 captions, used to be the standard for closed captioning for NTSC TV broadcasts in the United States and Canada...

and CEA-708 to their tape masters. The typical workflow included first printing the SD or HD video to a tape and sending it to a professional closed caption service company that had a stand alone closed caption hardware encoder.

This new closed captioning workflow known as e-Captioning involves making a proxy video from the non-linear system to import into a third-party non-linear closed captioning software. Once the closed captioning software project is completed, it must export a closed caption file compatible with the non-linear editing system. In the case of Final Cut Pro 7, three different file formats can be accepted: a .SCC file (Scenarist Closed Caption file) for Standard Definition video, a QuickTime

QuickTime

608 Closed Caption track (a special 608 coded track in the .mov file wrapper) for Standard Definition video, and finally a QuickTime 708 Closed Caption track (a special 708 coded track in the .mov file wrapper) for High Definition video output.

Alternatively, Matrox video systems

Matrox

Matrox is a producer of video card components and equipment for personal computers. Based in Dorval, Quebec, Canada it was founded by Lorne Trottier and Branko Matić....

devised another mechanism for inserting closed caption data by allowing the video editor to include CEA-608 and CEA-708 in a discrete audio channel on the video editing timeline. This allows real-time preview of the captions while editing and is compatible with Final Cut Pro 6 and 7.

Other non-linear editing systems indirectly support closed captioning only in Standard Definition line-21. Video files on the editing timeline must be composited with a line-21 VBI graphic layer known in the industry as a "blackmovie" with closed caption data. Alternately, video editors working with the DV25 and DV50 firewire workflows must encode their DV .avi or .mov file with VAUX data which includes CEA-608 closed caption data.

Open captioning

Regular open captioned broadcasts began on PBS

Public Broadcasting Service

The Public Broadcasting Service is an American non-profit public broadcasting television network with 354 member TV stations in the United States which hold collective ownership. Its headquarters is in Arlington, Virginia....

’s The French Chef
The French Chef
The French Chef is an influential television cooking show created by Julia Child, and produced and broadcast by WGBH Public television in Boston, Massachusetts, from February 11, 1963 to 1973. It was one of the first cooking shows on television...

in 1972. WGBH

WGBH-TV

WGBH-TV, channel 2, is a non-commercial educational public television station located in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. WGBH-TV is a member station of the Public Broadcasting Service , and produces more than two-thirds of PBS's national prime time television programming...

began open captioning of ZOOM, ABC World News Tonight, and Once Upon a Classic
Once Upon a Classic
Once Upon a Classic was an American television program hosted by Bill Bixby, at the time of The Incredible Hulk fame. The program aired on PBS from 1976 to 1980 as a production of WQED in Pittsburgh....

shortly thereafter.

Technical development of closed captioning

Closed captioning was first demonstrated at the First National Conference on Television for the Hearing Impaired in Nashville, Tennessee in
1971. A second demonstration of closed captioning was held at Gallaudet College (now Gallaudet University

Gallaudet University

Gallaudet University is a federally-chartered university for the education of the deaf and hard of hearing, located in the District of Columbia, U.S...

) on February 15, 1972 where ABC

American Broadcasting Company

The American Broadcasting Company is an American commercial broadcasting television network. Created in 1943 from the former NBC Blue radio network, ABC is owned by The Walt Disney Company and is part of Disney-ABC Television Group. Its first broadcast on television was in 1948...

and the National Bureau of Standards demonstrated closed captions embedded within a normal broadcast of The Mod Squad
The Mod Squad
The Mod Squad is a television series that ran on ABC from September 24, 1968, until August 23, 1973. This series starred Michael Cole, Peggy Lipton, Clarence Williams III, and Tige Andrews...

.

The closed captioning system was successfully encoded and broadcast in 1973 with the cooperation of PBS station WETA

WETA-TV

WETA-TV is a Public Broadcasting Service member public televisionstation for the Washington, D.C., area. Its studios are in nearby Arlington, Virginia...

. As a result of these tests, the FCC in 1976 set aside line 21 for the transmission of closed captions. PBS engineers then developed the caption editing consoles that would be used to caption prerecorded programs.

Real-time captioning, a process for captioning live broadcasts, was developed in 1982. In real-time captioning, court reporters trained to write at speeds of over 225 words per minute give viewers instantaneous access to live news, sports and entertainment. As a result, the viewer sees the captions within two to three seconds of the words being spoken.

Full-scale closed captioning

The National Captioning Institute was created in 1979 in order to get the cooperation of the commercial television networks.

The first use of regularly scheduled uses of closed captioning on American television was on March 16, 1980. Sears had developed and sold the Telecaption adapter, a decoding unit that could be connected to a standard television set. The first programs seen with captioning were the ABC Sunday Night Movie, Disney's Wonderful World on NBC

NBC

The National Broadcasting Company is an American commercial broadcasting television network and former radio network headquartered in the GE Building in New York City's Rockefeller Center with additional major offices near Los Angeles and in Chicago...

, and Masterpiece Theatre
Masterpiece Theatre
Masterpiece is a drama anthology television series produced by WGBH Boston. It premiered on Public Broadcasting Service on January 10, 1971, making it America's longest-running weekly prime time drama series. The series has presented numerous acclaimed British productions...

on PBS

Public Broadcasting Service

. The captioned Disney feature, showing at 7:00 pm EST, was the film Son of Flubber

Son of Flubber

Son of Flubber is the 1963 black-and-white sequel to the Walt Disney children's movie comedy The Absent-Minded Professor , also starring Fred MacMurray as a scientist who has perfected a high-bouncing substance, Flubber that can levitate an automobile and cause athletes to bounce into the sky...

, while the movie at 9:00 EST was Semi-Tough

Semi-Tough

Semi-Tough is a 1977 film directed by Michael Ritchie and starring Burt Reynolds, Kris Kristofferson, Jill Clayburgh, Lotte Lenya, Bert Convy, and Brian Dennehy. The plot involves a love triangle between the characters portrayed by Reynolds, Kristofferson and Clayburgh...

Legislative development in the U.S.

Until the passage of the Television Decoder Circuitry Act of 1990, television captioning was performed by a set-top box manufactured by Sanyo Electric and marketed by The National Captioning Institute (NCI). Through discussions with the manufacturer it was established that the appropriate circuitry integrated into the television set would be less expensive than the stand-alone box, and a Sanyo employee provided expert witness testimony on behalf of Sanyo and Gallaudet University in support of the passage of the bill. On January 23, 1991, the Television Decoder Circuitry Act of 1990 was passed by US Congress. This Act gave the Federal Communications Commission

Federal Communications Commission

(FCC) power to enact rules on the implementation of Closed Captioning. This Act required all analog television receivers with screens of at least 13 inches or greater, either sold or manufactured, to have the ability to display closed captioning by July 1, 1993.

Also in 1990, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was passed to ensure equal opportunity for persons with disabilities. The ADA prohibits discrimination against persons with disabilities in public accommodations or commercial facilities. Title III of the ADA requires that public facilities, such as hospitals, bars, shopping centers and museums (but not movie theaters), provide access to verbal information on televisions, films or slide shows.

The Telecommunications Act of 1996

Telecommunications Act of 1996

The Telecommunications Act of 1996 was the first major overhaul of United States telecommunications law in nearly 62 years, amending the Communications Act of 1934. This Act, signed by President Bill Clinton, was a major stepping stone towards the future of telecommunications, since this was the...

expanded on the Decoder Circuity Act to place the same requirements on digital television

Digital television

Digital television is the transmission of audio and video by digital signals, in contrast to the analog signals used by analog TV...

receivers by July 1, 2002. All TV programming distributors in the U.S. are required to provide closed caption for Spanish language video programming as of January 1, 2010.

A bill, H.R. 3101, the Twenty-First Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act of 2010, was passed by the United States House of Representatives in July 2010, and was signed by President Barack Obama

Barack Obama

Barack Hussein Obama II is the 44th and current President of the United States. He is the first African American to hold the office. Obama previously served as a United States Senator from Illinois, from January 2005 until he resigned following his victory in the 2008 presidential election.Born in...

on October 8, 2010. The Act requires, in part, for HDTV-decoding set-top box remotes to have a button to turn on or off the closed captioning in the output signal. It also requires broadcasters to provide captioning for television programs redistributed on the web.

Legislative development in Australia

The government of Australia provided seed funding in 1981 for the establishment of the Australian Caption Centre (ACC) and the purchase of equipment. Captioning by the ACC commenced in 1982 and a further grant from the Australian government enabled the ACC to achieve and maintain financial self-sufficiency. The ACC, now known as Media Access Australia

Media Access Australia

Media Access Australia is Australia's only not-for-profit media access organisation. .People with disabilities, particularly those who are Deaf, hearing impaired, blind or vision impaired, are in many cases excluded from mainstream audiovisual media, with often profound implications for...

, sold its commercial captioning division to Red Bee Media

Red Bee Media

Red Bee Media Limited is a media management company.Headquartered in west London, United Kingdom at the Broadcast Centre, with international offices in Scotland, Australia, France, Germany and Spain, Red Bee Media has 1500 employees worldwide including homeworkers and revenues of £153m in...

in December 2005. Red Bee Media continues to provide captioning services to Australia today.

Logo

The current and most familiar logo for closed captioning consists of two C

Ĉ or ĉ is a consonant in Esperanto orthography, representing the sound .Esperanto orthography uses a diacritic for all four of its postalveolar consonants, as do the Latin-based Slavic alphabets...

s (for "closed captioned") inside a television screen. It was created by Jack Foley while he was a senior graphic designer at WGBH

WGBH-TV

. The other logo, trademark

Trademark

A trademark, trade mark, or trade-mark is a distinctive sign or indicator used by an individual, business organization, or other legal entity to identify that the products or services to consumers with which the trademark appears originate from a unique source, and to distinguish its products or...

ed by the National Captioning Institute

National Captioning Institute

, is that of a simple geometric rendering of a television set

Television set

A television set is a device that combines a tuner, display, and speakers for the purpose of viewing television. Television sets became a popular consumer product after the Second World War, using vacuum tubes and cathode ray tube displays...

merged with the tail of a speech balloon

Speech balloon

Speech balloons are a graphic convention used most commonly in comic books, comic strips and cartoons to allow words to be understood as representing the speech or thoughts of a given character in the comic...

; 2 such versions exist: one with a tail on the left, the other with a tail on the right.

External links

Closed Captioning of Video Programming – 47 C.F.R. 79.1—From the Federal Communications Commission
Federal Communications Commission
The Federal Communications Commission is an independent agency of the United States government, created, Congressional statute , and with the majority of its commissioners appointed by the current President. The FCC works towards six goals in the areas of broadband, competition, the spectrum, the...

Consumer & Governmental Affairs Bureau
FCC Consumer Facts on Closed Captioning
Closed Captioned TV: A Resource for ESL Literacy Education—From the Education Resources Information Center
Education Resources Information Center
ERIC - the Education Resources Information Center - is an online digital library of education research and information. ERIC is sponsored by the Institute of Education Sciences of the U.S. Department of Education...

Clearinghouse for ESL Literacy Education, Washington D.C.
Bill Kastner: The Man Behind Closed Captioning
Captioning Key for Educational Media, Described and Captioned Media Program

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.

Terminology

Application

Television and video

Conversations

Caption channels

DVDs

Movies

Video games

Online Video Streaming

Theatre

Telephones

Media monitoring services

Americas

Incompatibility issues with HDTV

Europe

DTV standard captioning improvements

Non-linear video editing systems and closed captioning

Open captioning

Technical development of closed captioning

Full-scale closed captioning

Legislative development in the U.S.

Legislative development in Australia

Logo

See also

External links