Have you ever stopped and thought, "how do those who are hearing impaired watch television?" You may answer, well that's what those captions are for, and you would be correct. However, you would be astounded at the lack of television stations in which provide this service. The only regular network channel to provide closed captioning is Fox. As far as other channels go,on basic cable of about one hundred channels, only about 7 of those channels will offer closed captioning.
Now you may be wondering why does this matter? Don't most hearing impaired have hearing aids? Shockingly, many do not. Hearing aids are not covered by most insurance plans, despite the great need many people have for them. Out of pocket, the most basic pair of hearing aids cost roughly $4000. Once the individual has their hearing aids, they usually can only hear the TV if there is no music on while the character is talking, and there is no background noise what so ever in the household, which is not every common. The noise of a fish tank running or the oven being on, is enough to prevent the individual wearing hearing aids from hearing the TV
I began to notice how serve this issue was this past year during the election. My mother has sever hearing loss and has since I was a child, she mostly reads lips to understand others, and because of this she never watched much TV. She only would watch shows that had closed captioning, even if she didn't like it. (Huge shout out to criminal minds for having closed captioning!) My mother would have to stop watching a show if it switched stations and the new one did not have closed captioning, this I was used to, but I was outraged when the election came around and my mother was not able to keep up with the debates due to her inability to hear. Anything live that attempts to have closed captioning typically is so far behind and spelled so wrong, it just causes more confusion than anything. She would have to stand direcxtly in front of the TV to even attempt to unstand the candidates positions.
With so many of our elderly not having full hearing capabilities, why do we not make more of an attempt to accommodate them? All people deserve to be able to watch the political debates and be informed of what is being said. Everyone deserves to have the same Information, however we seem to forget that when we choose to not provide closed captioning for such huge events. This leads to a larger amount of elderly being uninformed due to accessibility to information seeing as they must go online for their information when the Internet if full of fake news sites now. This is leading to uninformed voters and individuals who feel like they are not thought about during this large events. We need to make a push for all stations, especially news stations, to be held accountable and have to provide close captioning for their programs.
