Captioning pioneer John E. D. Ball dies

From The Washington Post:

John E.D. Ball, 77, founding president of the National Captioning Institute and two-time national Emmy Award winner for his television engineering work, died March 25 at the Fairfax Nursing Center of complications from a stroke suffered in November at his home in Vienna.

Mr. Ball was a native of Scotland who came to the United States mid-career in the 1960s.

In 1971, he joined the Public Broadcasting Service and helped implement the first domestic satellite distribution system. That project, completed in 1978, won Mr. Ball his first Emmy award for engineering.

His second came two years later for his efforts to develop closed captioning for television programs. About the same time, he became president of the brand-new National Captioning Institute, a nonprofit entity that worked to expand the availability of closed captioning.

During his 15 years at NCI, real-time captioning was improved and the first live news broadcasts were captioned. At the urging of NCI and others, Congress passed a law in 1990 that required new televisions with screens larger than 13 inches to be equipped with closed-captioning technology.

Many in the deaf and hard-of-hearing community applauded the work of NCI, and Mr. Ball was awarded an honorary degree from Gallaudet University in Washington. He also received a distinguished service award from the American-Speech-Language-Hearing Association.

John Edward Dewar Ball was a native of Glasgow, Scotland, and a graduate of Glasgow's Royal College of Science and Technology.

He served two years in the Royal Air Force as a radio signaller and 13 years with the BBC before a doctor misdiagnosed rheumatoid arthritis in Mr. Ball's wife and advised moving to a warm, dry climate.

Mr. Ball promptly sought work overseas and in 1966 landed a job at the Computer Science Corp. in the District. He later worked for Intelsat on a global satellite distribution network.

He was a member of many telecommunications industry groups, authored numerous papers and held multiple patents. He was a member of the Cosmos Club and Vienna Presbyterian Church.

Survivors include his wife, the former Elizabeth Rodger of Vienna; three sons, Norman Ball of Leesburg, Adrian Ball of Arlington County and Evan Ball of Vienna; and a grandson.