Closed captioning font and method?

How do they do that anyway? Recently I spent some time with an older
relative who keeps closed captioning on, and realized why that font
looks so familiar (at least on the channels she usually had on).

It's the spittin' image of Dymo labelmaker output! You know -- those
things that look like a ray gun with an alphabet wheel so you could
spell things out with letters and numbers on self-sticking plastic
strips?

Makes me wonder whether vaguely similar technology was once involved in
captioning, or somebody studied various fonts and decided that one was
easy to read quickly from a distance, or what. Any good thoughts?

Allen Abel...

That seems to be a function of the caption decoder in the TV. I
don't know if they still do this, but Zenith used to have decoding
circuitry that produced color backgrounds for the captions. (ISTR
seeing green captions on a yellow background at some point.)

John Duncan Yoyo...

I think the font is dependant on the make of the TV set in question.

I'm sure they stick to the simple easy to read ones since they expect
to have people with hearing problems might not have perfect vision
either.

Barry Margolin...

Also, you have to be able to read it quickly.

bklyntv...

My digital cable has a number of different font/color combo options.
I've never looked too closely at them, I only use it for "Footballer's
Wives(!)" or "Ab Fab" which are techinically in English but still
inscrutable!