Many at FCC DTV Caption Meeting Support Database
Starting a database on common digital caption problems and how to fix them was supported by industry and consumer group attendees at the first meeting Monday of the FCC’s DTV technical working group (CD May 4 p10). People with hearing problems and those who advocate for them spoke about many captioning issues that cropped up with broadcasters’ digital switch. Broadcast, cable and consumer electronics executives said they're aware of some problems. Fixing those that are isolated or brought to their attention a long time after the fact is hard, they said.
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“Like most new technologies, there were and there are some kinks to work out,” said acting FCC Chairman Michael Copps. “The challenge is that it’s often difficult to tell where the breakdown occurs” and whether it’s an equipment, encoding or other issue, he added. “We want you folks to try to work through these problems, to try to pinpoint these problems and hopefully to resolve them” with “practical solutions.”
“I take as a given that the closed captioning video system is supposed to work,” said Office of Engineering and Technology Chief Julius Knapp, co-chairman of the group. “We expect these things to function the way they should.” Industry is working in “good-faith,” he added, “but I know there have been problems, and it causes a lot of frustration for the users of these systems.” Consumer & Governmental Affairs Bureau Chief Cathy Seidel, the other co-chairman, said she wanted to explore the possibility of a clearinghouse for captioning problems. Mike Jacobs, an aide to Seidel, said the working group will make recommendations to the FCC Consumer Advisory Committee, which in turn will make closed- captioning recommendations to the commission.
Members of the group from industry said any captioning database should include information deemed by experts to be useful and not be open to additions by all consumers. “It’s been frustratingly difficult to actually get enough information to figure out what happened” after problems occur, said Brian Markwalter of the CEA. Including “vetted problems” in the database is a good idea, he said. It could include “a set of best practices” for distributing and decoding captions, said Greg DePriest of NBC.
DirecTV has a “backlog” of captioning information, but some is dated because it gets complaints “days or weeks or sometimes months later,” said Bob Gabrielli, representing the satellite-TV provider. Further complicating things is that some Dish Network subscribers had problems with captions on shows stored on DVRs, said John Card, representing EchoStar. A database would help “triage some of these issues,” said Andy Scott of the NCTA. “Some of these things that I think are systemic -- it would get rid of the problem.”
Problems reported by the hearing impaired to advocacy groups include improperly-sized captions, lack of synchronization between them and a show’s actual audio and difficulty setting up TVs to get the descriptions. Since the FCC’s May 1 announcement of Monday’s meeting, working group member Cheryl Heppner said she’s gotten “many, many e-mails” about problems. “The landscape keeps shifting -- every time we have an answer to a problem, then a wrinkle comes in,” said Heppner, representing the Hearing Loss Association of America. “My fear is that on June 12th when the full conversion happens we will see people who won’t have captions.”
Among 1,100 people with hearing problems surveyed, a majority said captions were frequently garbled and were out of sync with the audio, according to Chris Soukup with Communication Service for the Deaf, which did the survey. Forty-six percent said captions were cut off or placed in mid-screen, 40 percent said they were delivered in two lines, “one on top of the other, making it difficult to distinguish” between them, and 31 percent said captions sometimes filled up the entire screen, he said. Setting up TVs to display captions “has gotten so complicated,” said panelist Karen Strauss, from the Consumer Advisory Committee, that it’s “incredibly difficult.”
Captioning providers, broadcasters and cable operators try to quickly track down problems, they said. “Finding the root of the problem and chasing it down has been really quite exhausting,” said Larry Goldberg of WGBH Boston’s National Center for Accessible Media. “There’s really no need to point fingers” because there are many “responsible parties,” he said. Graham Jones, representing the NAB on the working group, said he believes “the standards are basically sound” but isn’t “quite so happy with the implementation issues.”
Stations had an easier time dealing with analog captions, but digital has “been very challenging because the technology is very complex,” said Andy Setos of Fox. Three years ago, the broadcast network “had tremendous challenges with very late captions,” but now captions in pre-taped shows run less than a second after the audio, while there may be a several-second lag with live programming, Setos said. “We are becoming I think successful and at a point where captioning can be as reliable and routine in digital programming as it is in analog” but “we're not there yet.”