FCC Sets Six Month Deadline for Online Closed Captioning

Last October, President Obama signed into law the Twenty-First Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act of 2010 — "a bill to increase the access of persons with disabilities to modern communications, and for other purposes." In short it required that Internet video content be closed-captioned for the hearing impaired — just as it is on broadcast and cable television.

That goal is yet to be achieved, but on July 18, 2011, the FCC's Video Programming Accessibility Advisory Committee mandated that the law be implemented within six months. Moreover, the committee said that "regardless of how the captioned video is transmitted and decoded, the consumer must be given an experience that is equal to, if not better than, the experience provided as the content was originally aired on television."

Right now, persons with hearing disabilities watching streamed movies on, say, Netflix, rarely have the benefit of closed captioning. But with streaming beginning to overtake DVDs as the primary method of watching video, the new closed-captioning law is well overdue.

CWA fully supports closed-captioning, as well as telecommunications accessibility for all in every media.

S. 3304: Twenty-First Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act of 2010 (GovTack.us)

FCC sets six-month deadline for Internet closed captioning (Broadcast Engineering)