If I Were President of the NAD

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If I were President of the National Association of the Deaf, here is the press release I would be sending out today:

NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF THE DEAF URGES BOYCOTT
OF COMPANIES WITH NON-CAPTIONED SUPER BOWL ADS

SILVER SPRING, MD — February 4, 2008 — The National Association of the Deaf today urged a boycott of some of America’s biggest corporations for not closed-captioning their Super Bowl ads.

AT&T, Dell, Ford, Disney, E-Trade, Hyundai, Taco Bell and PepsiCo were among the companies that ran uncaptioned ads this year. PepsiCo’s failure to caption was especially ironic, given that it also aired “Bob’s House,” a commercial filmed in American Sign Language with open captions.

“Enough is enough!” said NAD President Tom Willard. “As we near the 30th anniversary of closed captioning, there is absolutely no excuse for any company anywhere to put an ad on TV without closed captioning.”

“But the Super Bowl?! Come on! Companies pay $2.7 million for a 30-second spot this year, plus the costs of producing the ads. And they can’t pay an extra $200 for the captions?”

Closed captioning is neither complicated or expensive, said the NAD. All it takes is an awareness that about 10 percent of the Super Bowl audience of 75 million 95 million is made up of people who are deaf or hard of hearing. Captioning also benefits people watching TV in airports, gyms and noisy places like bars — where people traditionally watch the Super Bowl.

“The man on the street might not know much about closed captioning, but for people who make a living in TV advertising to show such disregard for such a simple and yet important thing, frankly, boggles my mind,” said Willard.

Some companies in the past have said that they could not add captioning because they were tinkering with their ads up until the final moments. “That is a sorry excuse,” said Willard. “It can be done in as little as an hour. And when’s the last time an ad ran without sound because they didn’t have time to put it in?”

Fox could easily adopt a requirement that every ad be captioned, he added, and he doesn’t understand why they don’t. The NAD plans to request a meeting with Fox executives to get to the bottom of it.

The NAD praised an anonymous group of parents who have been compiling statistics since 2000 on which Super Bowl ads are captioned and which are not. A quick look at this year’s list, posted at www.captions.com, shows that the uncaptioned ads outnumbered the captioned ads by nearly 2 to 1.

Closed captioning began to grow in the early 80s, and around 10 years later, Congress mandated that most TVs have captioning built in. Today a majority of TV programs are captioned, in part because of FCC regulations, but the majority of commercials still run without captions. The NAD is particularly disturbed by the large number of political commercials and public service announcements that are uncaptioned.

“Someone once joked to me that I was lucky, as if hearing people have to put up with the ads and deaf people don’t. But I’ve come to see it as an unending assault when I’m in the comfort of my own home. I find ads without captions offensive and insulting and demeaning and a form of entrenched discrimination that has to go. Enough is enough!”

The NAD urges people all over — deaf and hard of hearing, family, friends, other people with disabilities, supporters — to go to www.captions.com and make use of the links provided for most companies. Take a minute to thank the companies that captioned their ads. Tell the ones that didn’t that you’re taking your business elsewhere.

“It’s time to put an end to this annual display of shocking insensitivity,” said Willard.

– END –

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