FCC Video Accessibility Panel Works on Three More Reports

An FCC rulemaking taking up the captioning report’s recommendations is expected by committee members to be released soon, given agency officials worked on their proposed regulations in tandem with the work on the Internet Protocol report. The regulator has six months to issue final rules on captioning video that goes into IP format, said VPAAC Co-Chairman Larry Goldberg. “The timeline and the deadline for this first one was so tight,” said Goldberg. He runs the National Center for Accessible Media at public broadcasting’s WGBH Boston. “They're under quite a bit of pressure to now have the” rulemaking ready, Goldberg added. Commission representatives had no comment on the committee’s work beyond confirming the authenticity of the IP report.

Advocates for industry and other groups said all sides worked well within a subcommittee that focused on the first report. The entire subcommittee, which the VPAAC’s official website says had 35 representatives, generally agreed with the recommendations, members said. There were no abstentions among subcommittee members on the recommendations, and industry and consumer advocates “worked great together,” Goldberg said. CEA Senior Vice President Brian Markwalter also views the report as consensus-based, he said.

Appendix C listed six points on which the committee couldn’t reach consensus. User-controlled placement of captions and positioning, a timeline to implement user-controlled features and responsibility to assure caption delivery were among those issues. “Mandated user control of the placement of captioning, so that captions may be moved to a preferred location determined by the viewer, is indicated as a highly desired feature by some, while others felt that there may be technical limitations making it difficult to accomplish on some devices,” the report said. “Some objected to allowing users to reposition captions to locations that would overlap specific portions of the video image.” Some members wanted captions to be able to go below video, such as under “a widescreen/letterbox formatting of the video,” it said. “Others were concerned that for some devices, this could not be readily accomplished, if at all.”

The relatively short length of the unresolved section shows the report was a cooperative endeavor, Markwalter and other VPAAC members said. It represented “pretty good work for an emerging area like IP video, a good step forward” for the panel, he said. On emergency accessibility, being dealt with by another subcommittee, “the requirements are fairly specific, we just have to think through all the issues,” Markwalter said. “There are bits of overlap between these various topics,” so even with subgroups for each report, their work “can’t be entirely separated,” he said. Another group is working on recommendations about user interfaces and one is developing proposals on the passthrough of closed captions and video descriptions. VPAAC has said it must complete reports to the commission on all other areas besides IP captioning -- whose deadline of Wednesday was met two days early -- by April 8.

The IP group is being dissolved, since its report is done, and members can move into other subgroups working on future reports, participants said. “Each of the subcommittees is working as hard as they can” given “the timeline is very short for all of us,” said Director Lise Hamlin of the Hearing Loss Association of America. “We did a lot of work in a short amount of time -- and the commission is doing the same,” said Hamlin, on the IP group. “They've been doing a lot of work on pulling together their rulemaking, even as we do our work,” she said. “We're going to see something relatively soon, considering the amount of work going on here.”