AT&T PEG Criticism Mounts as Advocates Press Anew for Better Blind Access

Rocco and other PEG advocates acknowledge there’s nothing new about such concerns, which a lawyer who filed a 2009 petition at the FCC against AT&T said came up in that document, too. The FCC doesn’t seem inclined to soon grant that petition, filed by the Alliance for Community Media (ACM) and others, said commission and industry officials. The Media Bureau doesn’t appear to believe the allegations that AT&T discriminates against PEG programming and should have to treat it like commercial channels have merit on their face, they said. They said the bureau also may be wary that by acting on the petition it would raise the issue of whether U-verse is a cable system, as the petitioner contends. Spokespeople for the bureau and AT&T had no comment.

A recent report from AT&T on the accessibility of its services in part spurred the letter to Stephenson. “We believe this report is the smoking gun that shows AT&T knew in advance of its roll out of U-Verse that PEG channels would not be accessible to the visually impaired,” Rocco said. The report from the company’s human factors group said its lab tries to make design adjustments before products or services are released, the statement noted. AT&T has said that it’s committed to distributing PEG channels, carries hundreds of them, and that video quality of such programming is high (CD May 19 p15). Rocco wants to meet with Stephenson and AT&T’s access and aging advisory panel to get the company to fix PEG so its shows can be accessed by those with problems seeing “just like any other commercial channel on the system,” the letter said. “This architecture discriminates not only against the PEG channels, but it also discriminates against the blind and vision impaired."

Rocco said he and allies didn’t approach AT&T before writing Stephenson, that the letter is unrelated to scrutiny of the company’s agreement to buy T-Mobile and that the telco hasn’t made other changes sought by ACT. “We have been concerned about their PEG platform from the moment they announced it,” and AT&T “clearly made whatever business decision they wanted to make without clearly thinking through” that PEG programming is “inaccessible and are important channels to local communities,” Rocco said in an interview. He doesn’t see any other fix to the problem besides AT&T giving each PEG channel its own position. “No other cable operator treats PEG this way,” ACT said. “PEG channels are usually treated the same as the other commercial channels, accessible by selecting the number of the channel through the remote control.”

"It’s hard for us to believe that they do not know this” was a problem, ACT Executive Director Bunnie Riedel told us of the company. She and Rocco said AT&T also puts VOD programming into subchannels, but the difference is that PEG is available on the most basic package and for no extra charge, unlike some on-demand programming. Another problem is that people who use reading services for the blind, which are carried as secondary audio program on some PEG channels, can’t access it on U-verse, said lawyer Tim Lay of Spiegel & McDiarmid, representing ACM. “Getting to that reading service on channel 99 is very difficult for that sight-impaired person, and that was pointed out two years ago."

ACM also hasn’t brought up the issue in any meetings with AT&T, but the telco didn’t address the petition’s concern on access for those with vision problems in its response at the FCC, Lay said. “Talking to AT&T is like trying to talk to a brick wall. Usually they tell you how great their service is.” As for the commission, “we're trying to blast them loose over there -- it kind of seems stuck,” Lay said. “Doing nothing” on the petition by the agency “is the same as denying” it, he said, “because AT&T is killing PEG viewership on its system.”