With the help of our wonderful partners – including charities, companies and famous ambassadors – it’s our mission to have as many children as possible watching with captions on.
Switch On | Read On isn’t a company or an entity; it’s a message and a desire by a group of like-minded individuals to help children improve their literacy skills.
The statistics on the impact of low levels of literacy on a child’s life chances are shocking and upsetting. Many organisations are working tirelessly on the issue, but a lot of them are hampered by the scale of the problem and the necessary funds to reach every child that needs help.
That’s where the beauty of the Switch On | Read On message comes into play - the solution for parents and teachers is free. 80% of the World has access to a TV or a screen and this is only increasing year on year. When a child watches their favourite cartoons or really any content, on that TV or device, we want that to be with the subtitles (captions) switched ON.
Many people are generously volunteering their time to help get the Switch On | Read On message out to as many parents, carers, teachers, government and TV companies as possible.
Our mission? To help a billion children to read by the end of 2027.
Henry is a multi-award winning innovation expert and entrepreneur specialising in Education Technology. He’s the former Director of Innovation for Pearson plc and the former Head of Innovation for GEMS as well as an advisor to His Highness The Aga Khan’s schools. Prior to that, he founded the school’s network Rafiki and the charity Gemin-i. He is also the co-founder of Turn On The Subtitles.
Nina is a former senior manager at Accenture, holds a degree in computer science and is a mother to two (four if you include her husband and an overly needy spaniel). She is the workhorse behind Switch On, Read On and Caterpillar Captions and is often found berating Henry for committing to crazy ideas that she then has to implement.
Leib recognized the potential of “caption technology” and started Prime Time Reader, his first CC initiative, with a mission to “Turn passive TV time into beneficial reading time”. Based on this 1992 vision, “Make Screen Time Reading Time ®” is now a proudly registered trademark of the USPTO.
The Switch On | Read On campaign has collected evidence from world-leading researchers to demonstrate the benefits of Same Language Subtitles (SLS) for increasing literacy rates, as well as reading, media access and language acquisition. These experts in their field from across the globe have all recognised these benefits and their research shows how powerful a tool SLS can be in improving literacy rates and in turn increase the opportunities for children around the world.
Dr Brij Kothari is an academic and social entrepreneur. He is on the faculty of the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (IIM-A) and the founder of PlanetRead.org and BookBox.com who are committed to scalable solutions for literacy and language learning. He led the campaign for the use of Same Language Subtitling (SLS) on mainstream TV for mass literacy in 1996. SLS became India’s broadcast policy in 2019, thanks to 23 years of research and advocacy, of which Brij played a central role. Brij is an Ashoka Fellow, Stanford Digital Vision Fellow, and was selected as India’s Social Entrepreneur of the Year in 2009 by the Schwab Foundation. He was the recipient of the inaugural International Literacy Prize from the Library of Congress in 2013. He has a Ph.D. in education from Cornell University and a Masters in Physics from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur.
Dr Deborah Nichols is Associate Professor of Human Development in the College of Health and Human Sciences atPurdue University. Her research focuses on the relationship between children’s cognitive development and learning and the use of multimedia materials; whilst looking at how these relations vary by demographic and social indicators. She has authored over 100 journal articles, book chapters, practitioner-targeted documents, and co-authored the edited volume Media Exposure During Infancy and Early Childhood: The Effects of Content and Context on Learning and Development with Rachel Barr. Dr Nichols has also collaborated with many educational media companies including the Sesame Workshop and Nickelodeon; members of Congress; and other private agencies and foundations both domestically and internationally, these include Captions For All, the World Bank, Children’s Investment Fund Foundation and National Literacy Trust, U.K.
Dr Jan Pedersen is the University of Stockholm’s Director of the Institute for Interpreting and Translation Studies where he has produced research into the effects of subtitles across Europe. Receiving his Ph.D. from Stockholm University in 2007 with his dissertation being a comparative study of TV subtitling norms in the Scandinavian countries, Dr Pedersen was made an Associate Professor in Translation Studies at the same institute in 2015. He is the former president of the European Association for Studies in Screen Translation, co-editor of Benjamins Translation Library and Journal of Audio-visual Translation, which he also co-founded. His monograph Subtitling Norms for Television examined subtitling norms across Europe and explored future developments which could be made in this area. He is a frequent presenter at international conferences and has also worked as a television subtitler and a teacher of English across all levels for many years.
Dr Robert Vanderplank is a pioneer of research into the value of same language subtitles for foreign/second-language learning and has continued to conduct research in this field along with other areas of applied linguistics and second language acquisition. He obtained his Ph.D in Applied Linguistics at Edinburgh University and has since taught and researched English language and applied linguistics at Helsinki University, the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne and Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, before moving to Oxford University in 1996 to be Director of the Language Centre. He retired in 2016 from his directorship role and is currently an Emeritus Fellow at Kellogg College, Oxford, and Director of the Centre for the Study of Lifelong Language Learning at the college.
Head of the Department of Linguistics at Macquarie University in Sydney since 2013, Dr Jan-Louis Kruger is an expert on the study of media accessibility and audio-visual translation, with particular focus on the effects of subtitles. His research focus on eye tracking has allowed him to further understand processing language in multi-modal contexts and the effects different variables have on the reading of subtitles. He has worked with academics in Australia to compile research into the effect of subtitles on the cognitive process and in learning first and second languages. Prior to his current role, Dr Kruger worked at North-West University in South Africa as the Director of the School of Languages, where he primarily researched the use of subtitles in an academic context.
The technical process of turning on the subtitles by default means different things to different broadcasters/tech companies. Our board of technical advisers is there to help the broadcasters do this in a cost effective and efficacious manner.
Having held CTO positions within Channel 4 Television and Marks & Spencer, Bob has over 40 years experience in the IT sector, much of that time operating as a C-level technical strategist in a range of Corporate environments. He has established a reputation for tracking and harnessing disruptive technologies and leveraging them to deliver competitive advantage. Since leaving Channel 4 in 2014, where he was responsible for their technology strategy spanning IT, Web, Mobile, and broadcast, Bob now operates as an independent IT Consultant at Ethereality Associate, and is involved in developing Voice applications for the Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant platforms.
Gideon’s career can be split in two halves, both dominated by content delivery and technology. For the first half, Gideon was a journalist whose specialism was charting the impact of technology on TV. Late,r Gideon switched into Product Management and has led the development of a number of leading and transformative digital products, including BBC iPlayer, Sky Q and Arsenal Player. He also addressed the D2C distribution challenges of numerous content businesses while at startup Base79 (later Rightster/Brave Bison), then YouTube’s largest content network partner in Europe.
Gavin is committed to leading media industry clients to the “new” through use of digital to grow traditional revenues and launch new consumer services. His experience spans work with Warner Music when they started digitizing their business nearly 25 years ago—and continues through to recent work with The BBC to harness digital to transform their audience relationship. Gavin is the global Broadcast Industry lead at Accenture and works across the value chain in multiple industries including Broadcast, Music, Education, Movies, Games and Publishing.
Marina is co-founder and CEO of M2A Media. Founded in 2016 M2A has fast become a market leader in cloud-hosted video technology. M2A Media’s world leading live streaming and IP video transport products are relied on by top tier media companies like the BBC, ITV, Channel4, Rakuten, DAZN, and Sony. Prior to M2A, Marina was a technology director at the BBC where she led the teams that built the online video platform for iPlayer, the live video streaming platform for the 2012 Olympics, and migrated all of the BBC online media workflows to AWS cloud.
Gulliver is a Product-oriented CTO and digital strategist with over 20 years of experience across the media sector working for some of the best-known brands in the world. Gulliver previously worked at Sony as the CTO to their D2C and digital supply chain division and before that as an SVP running the global product and tech teams for Sony’s LA Studio. Prior to that, he was the VP of Product at the BBC, the CTO at Base79 where he oversaw a successful exit, and the Director of On-Demand at ITV.
John has over 40 years’ experience in subtitling, audio description and visual signing within the TV industry. As one of the original members of ITV’s ORACLE Teletext team, he pioneered many of the early developments in UK subtitling, and was closely involved in establishing the associated technical frameworks and standards. He has since led technical teams for several companies within the media technology sector, helping to navigate the transition of services from analogue to digital, and eventually to online platforms.
In a blink of an eye Switch On | Read On has become the largest literacy campaign in the world. So many people have helped that become a reality. We’d like to pay special thanks to the companies and individuals who have helped pay for all of this and given us their support and guidance – thank you so much one and all.
