Excerpt from: Media dis&dat (click for full article)
On
Monday night, ABC Family did something that no commercial television
outlet in the United States had ever done: it broadcast an entire
episode of a show in sign language, with closed captioning turned on by
default.
Advocates for the deaf and hard-of-hearing cheered the
move, and they wondered: would viewers tune in specifically for the
almost-silent episode of the series, “Switched at Birth,” one of ABC
Family’s most popular? Or would viewers turn it off, potentially
perturbed by the lack of audio? There was a normal musical score, and a
scene at the beginning of the episode with audible dialogue, but the
rest of the dialogue was in sign language.
Broadly speaking,
neither outcome came true. The show’s overnight Nielsen ratings were
down, but only slightly. Most fans of the show stayed with it — 1.6
million, according to the overnight ratings. The series this season has
averaged 1.7 million viewers.
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