The Silent Era of cinema was perhaps its most equitable with both hearing and hearing-impaired viewers able to enjoy productions alongside one another, but with the advent of “talkies,” deaf and hard-of-hearing American’s found themselves largely excluded from this new dominant entertainment medium. It wouldn’t be until the second half of the 20th century that advances in technology enabled captioned content to be broadcast directly into homes around the country. In his latest book, Turn on the Words! Deaf Audiences, Captions, and the Long Struggle for Access, Professor Emeritus, National Technical Institute for the Deaf at Rochester Institute of Technology, Harry G. Lang, documents the efforts of accessibility pioneers over the course of more than a century to bring closed captioning to the American people.
Gallaudet University Press
