National Captioning Institute

The history of closed captioning is inextricably linked with NCI, the nonprofit corporation created in 1979 to provide the option of television access to deaf and hard-of-hearing communities and subsequently to those learning to speak English as a second language. NCI's established importance in the closed captioning industry extends well beyond historical significance, however. For more than three decades, we have used innovation and dedication to lead the way in providing high-quality service to viewers, and ground-breaking technologies to the providers of closed captioning. In 1979, NCI developed the decoder box, and a decade later, we partnered with ITT Corporation to invent the first caption-decoding microchip for television sets. These technological developments have enabled the closed captioning industry to flourish, but it's our training procedures and practices that have yielded the standard-setting group of professional captioners actually responsible for producing "those words on the screen.” With a highly skilled captioning staff and state-of-the-art facilities, NCI supplies world-class captioning services for broadcast and cable television, webcasting, home video and DVD, and government and corporate video programming. NCI also offers subtitling and language translation services in virtually any language. As part of our commitment to television access, we additionally provide described video service for people who are blind or have low vision.