FCC Video Programming Accessibility Subgroups Work With FCC Staff on Forthcoming Reports

Joint efforts by FCC staffers and subgroup members will let the agency issue rulemaking notices on the issues raised by each report soon after each document is done, participants said. That happened with the report on IP captioning, an area in which the commission had to issue rules sooner under the 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act than the other three reports. A Media Bureau rulemaking notice asking about adopting the recommendations of the IP captioning report circulated Aug. 31 for a vote, and is expected to be approved by commissioners soon (CD Sept 9 p7). Rules are due in January.

Parallel work on subgroups’ reports and by officials of the bureau, the Consumer & Governmental Affairs Bureau and others on rulemaking notices means the reports will better inform the proceedings that will spring from them, participants said in interviews over the summer. They said the subgroups hold conference calls or other meetings about once a week, and work on the video description and emergency information reports seems most far along. Work on the user interfaces report may take the most time, because some complicated issues are coming up, VPAAC members said. It’s made up of advocates for the disabled and executives from the broadcasting, CE, MVPD and other industries. VPAAC members include AT&T, the CEA, Comcast, DirecTV, EchoStar, Google and Sony (http://vpaac.wikispaces.com/home).

User interface rules will deal with accessibility of on-screen text menus, closed captioning and other features on devices that get TV, said a commission official who’s participating in the work. The official said the legislation sets an Oct. 8, 2013, deadline for user interface rules to be written by the commission. Such rules also may cover the compatibility of video devices to get video description -- scenes in TV programming with little dialog and action that has narration so its accessible -- and emergency access issues, the FCC official said.

The goal on user interfaces is to figure out “the best way to make the entire command-and-control program guide fully accessible to someone who can’t see,” said VPAAC co-Chairman Larry Goldberg, director of the National Center for Accessible Media at public TV’s WGBH Boston. Such features are available in a few other countries, such as in the U.K., which has set-top boxes that are accessible to the disabled, he said. The video descriptions working group is “already pretty far along, because video descriptions already [are] being delivered,” Goldberg said. Under the act, the three reports are due April 8, 2012.

The act requires the agency to issue rules by April 8, 2013, on MVPDs and other TV distributors to convey accessible emergency information, said the FCC official: The agency has another six months to issue rules for video equipment to make such information accessible to those with problems seeing. The subgroup working on recommendations in that area has “surfaced the issues -- the needs of what the system should do,” Goldberg said: “And I think now is the harder part, because there isn’t a direct deliverable,” in devising recommendations. That subgroup hopes to have a first draft of its recommendations ready later this year, said Melanie Brunson, its co-chair and executive director of the American Council of the Blind. “We are moving at a pretty good pace,” she said. “We are pretty far along in the policy discussion, and the technical group is still doing a lot of drilling down into what we have preliminarily given them as some policy guidance."

The work of all four subgroups “is sort of intertwined,” Brunson said. “What one group does or doesn’t do will have some impact on what everyone else does” in the area of video accessibility, she added. “We are working on both long- and short-term solutions” for current devices to be accessible, and on “some creative thinking in terms of development of longer-term solutions” for future products, Brunson said. “When the reports do come out, hopefully a lot of the potential issues will be dealt with because of the input they've had throughout the process,” she said of the subgroups and VPAAC participants. Telecommunications for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing Executive Director Claude Stout, part of the IP subgroup, said he’s “optimistic the other working groups will follow suit with their own reports” that resolve many complex issues.

The VPAAC subgroups are “meeting regularly and are starting to make some progress” on the three reports, said CGB Deputy Bureau Chief Karen Peltz Strauss. “By way of example, I think it would be helpful for the other working groups to look” at the collaboration among members of the IP subgroup, she said. The forthcoming reports are “intended to provide us with as much guidance as any of these groups feel comfortable providing, and we'll fill in the rest with the actual rulemaking,” Peltz Strauss said. Such rulemakings will let the commission seek comment on the recommendations of each subgroup and on areas where members couldn’t reach agreement, she said. “The committee itself recognized that they could only go so far, and they left the rest to us, and that’s fine,” she said of the IP subgroup: “They did exactly what we asked them to do."

The three groups are “doing pretty cooperative work -- there really hasn’t been any dissension,” said Goldberg. Where any subgroup can’t reach consensus, “there is always going to be one more shot,” and that’s the rulemaking notice, he said. “But having virtually every sector represented, there really shouldn’t be any major blocks in terms of going toward that final step” for each subgroup, Goldberg said: “The commission was pretty hands-off” with the first report’s content, and has been on the coming recommendations, he added. “They really want the committee to do its own thing.”