Today's television execs owe lawmakers and regulators a debt of gratitude because captioning enables viewers to retrieve video content by key word through multimedia databases. And captioned televisions also allow people to watch programs in noisy environments such as sports bars and gyms. That means millions of additional televisions get sold each year. Even the Internet, which is spurring productivity and IT sales around the world, can trace of its most powerful features to the needs of the disabled. To be sure, not all assistive-technology research pays off.
History is littered with dozens of wacky devices that never caught on.
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