Television shapes our knowledge and understanding of our culture and of the broader world.
The advent of television captions, as assistive technology for the deaf, opened new possibilities for this population to access television media. Captions are the type-written version of the audio component of television, providing a visual display of the dialogue, narration, music and sound effects for those who cannot hear. As more television programs are captioned, it is still not clear how many people are fully able to utilize this technology. Thus, issues of literacy, conceptual knowledge and memory constraints come to bear on the comprehension of television captions. Without fluent word reading abilities and adequate background knowledge, however, a deaf person watching television may visually perceive the action, but because the specific information, the subtleties of the conversation or the entire story line of the program are in some way inaccessible the person is only perceiving the program.