Much of my time in the captioning field involved engineering work, from designing and writing software to create closed captions to serving on standards committees and co-designing the first ergonomic stenotype keyboard. I have also been a strong advocate for television access for deaf and hard-of-hearing people, speaking at conferences across the country and training hundreds of realtime captioners. For more captioning content, please visit my main captioning page.
Andrew Saks Engineering Award
Granted in 1997 for “outstanding contributions in improving visual accessibility to information via real-time captioning for deaf and hard of hearing Americans.”
This award is particularly meaningful to me because it showed that the captioning products I was designing mattered to the people that really needed them. I’ve been a captioning advocate for a long time, and it’s always felt somewhat abstract. An award like this makes it feel real.
Patent #7,360,234
Granted in 2008: “System, Method, and computer program product for selective filtering of objectionable content from a program.”
Developed for CaptionTV to be more flexible and customizable than V-chip technology.
Patent #8,245,252
Granted in 2012: “System, method, and computer program product for selective replacement of objectionable program content with less-objectionable content.”
Uses captions and metadata for substituting content.
Patent #8,312,485
Granted in 2012: “System, Method, and computer program product for selective filtering of objectionable content from a program.”
This is a continuation/extension of my first patent (#7,360,234).
Profile in Forbes Magazine
The Aug 2, 1993 issue of Forbes Magazine featured a profile of me written by Joseph R. Garber. I’m not a fan of the way they described the ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) and TDCA (Television Decoder Circuitry Act), as I’m a big supporter of both bills. Despite that, I thought the article was a good one.
Gary D. Robson 