My husband is an avid fan of Car Talk, a National Public Radio (NPR) call-in radio show. He especially likes to listen to it when we’re on road trips. I must admit I don’t understand his fascination, nor why he has to laugh every 30 seconds. One of these days, however, I might.

Radio – the final frontier – is being conquered, one signal at a time. At the recent Consumer Electronics Symposium (CES) in Las Vegas, a new technology was unveiled that will make radio more accessible to people with vision and hearing impairments. Imagine closed captions for radio, and you’ve got an idea of the prototype here.

The technology uses HD radio technology – which allows broadcasters to broadcast multiple transmissions in parallel. This extra capacity can be used for data streams similar to closed captioning on the TV. However, you’d need an enabled receiver to view these captions.

Some big names are involved in the effort, called ICART: NPR, Harris Corp., Towson University, and WGBH’s National Center for Accessible Media, among others. While the technology was demonstrated at CES, no manufacturer has signed on yet.

There’s a lot to figure out. It’s one thing to caption television, where visual cues sometimes add to captions (like sarcasm), and quite another to caption something solely audio. Indeed, “the technical barriers can and are being addressed,” says Mary Watkins, Outreach Director for WGBH’s Media Access Group. “The challenge will be in identifying the best method of creating captions for different types of programs and analyzing the cost and operating practices that radio stations would need to adopt in order to provide high quality captions. The work is just beginning so there are no clear cut answers yet.”

The precedent for audio-only captioning exists. Many local TV stations offer remote stenocaptioning where stenos are in a different state and can’t see the TV picture and only caption from audio, Watkins says. Of course, with this, viewers have the benefit of watching the screen, which helps them decode the occasional steno error. “If there are only captions, the ability to understand the steno errors may be lessened,” she says. “We will be investigating all of these issues.”

This new technology has very little impact on captioning providers like CaptionMax, says its Marketing Director Jay Wyant, other than expanding the potential market for its services. “However, to make live captioning available all day for each of the 1,500 radio stations currently broadcasting HD would require many, many more realtime writers than are available,” he says. “So we would expect that ICART would be working on developing some form of speech-to-text technology in order to make the service more widely available.”

Not only would I love to judge for myself whether Car Talk is truly funny, but I would also love to appreciate NPR’s collection of shows. Traffic reports would also be great. I don’t know if it will be possible, but viewing song lyrics along with hearing the music would be a huge draw for me as well.

Of course there’s one thing we’ll never be able to do: “listen” to the radio while multitasking. But I’ll settle for just “listening.”

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