More than 120 million Americans benefit from closed captioning, including 28 million deaf and hard-of-hearing people, 26 million elementary school children practicing reading skills, 30 million people learning English as a second language and 40 million Americans ages 16 and older learning to read.

In addition, a growing number of NBC viewers in restaurants, gyms, bars, airports and other public places utilize closed captioning to follow a program despite the loud atmosphere.

Gaining access to closed captioned programs is as easy as turning on your television. Today, caption decoders are a standard feature of television sets with screens 13" or larger.

As the number of closed caption viewers continues to increase, so does NBC 7/39's determination to provide quality news and entertainment to all of its viewers.

There are approximately 300,000 known hearing impaired residents in San Diego County.

NBC 7/39 Closed Captioning allows the audio portion of televised programs to be converted into written words that appear on the screen in the form of subtitles.

Real time closed captioning captures live news updates and ad-libs, information vital to a news watcher.