Closed captioning for television and movies has remained largely unchanged for decades, but a new design aims to give people with disabilities a better idea of what’s happening on screen.

Known as “Caption with Intention,” the system employs animation, color and variable typography to give viewers who aren’t hearing sound and dialogue a sense of emotion, tone and pacing.

The captioning system was developed by FCB Chicago, an advertising agency, in partnership with the Chicago Hearing Society and the film company Rakish Entertainment. Those behind the technology said they worked with members of the Deaf and hard of hearing community to refine the product in order to improve on deficits from traditional closed captioning in areas like speaker attribution, synchronization and intonation.

“I grew up with two deaf parents, so we only watched captioned programming in our house. As someone who could hear, I could tell just how much was missing — sarcasm, anger, joy, fear — all of it lost in plain white text,” said Bruno Mazzotti, executive creative director at FCB Chicago. “That experience stayed with me my whole life. This project was a chance to finally close that gap, not just for my parents, but for millions of people like them.”

Caption with Intention is open source and freely available to any content creators, television or film studios and streaming platforms.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences recently recognized Caption with Intention, supporting the technology as a new industry standard.