The initial design of communication technologies rarely reflect their needs and legal action was needed to force the industry to provide the services and access to information that would minimally approach those enjoyed by normally hearing people. Public and private response to the communication needs and access to communication technology for deaf people has historically been slow, especially when access to information is left to market forces alone. Silent movies with their captions were as accessible to deaf people as to hearing people. Over the protest of deaf people, captions were removed from movies when sound became available. However, the movie industry continued to caption movies for foreign audiences.
Airlines show in-flight movies and sell access to headphones.
Captioned videos of recent movies are available to the airline, which could be shown to all passengers for less than one cent per passenger. Open captioning of television programs has always been possible. However, people with hearing disabilities had to wait until the dialog could be hidden from the view of hearing people to gain full access to commercial television programming. In the intervening years deaf people enlisted the aid of hearing family members, friends, and members of the local community to act as telephone relay operators, and lobbied before local and national legislative bodies for laws to ensure their access to the technology. What is important to understand is that during those twenty-nine years the telecommunications companies could simply have assigned operators to handle TTY calls.