Amazon Slow to Caption Many TV Shows Once Online, Groups Say

The IP captioning rules were part of the agency’s implementation of the 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act (CVAA), and have been subject to petitions for reconsideration by the hearing disabilities advocates and associations including CEA. Another coming CVAA deadline for the FCC is April 9, and in spring that part of implementation will get attention at the regulator, an agency official noted. That’s when the commission must issue rules on using video descriptions to provide audio narration of what’s displayed on screen crawls during emergency programming. Industry wants some time for such rules to begin, and companies and advocates for the deaf (CD Dec 20 p12), including some of the groups that made the complaint Thursday against Amazon, filed comments this week in docket 12-107 (http://xrl.us/bn68ek).

Of 72 programs that advocates tracked on Amazon, 49 didn’t allow rendering of captions when they were initially put on the company’s service, the complaint said. It took a median of 2.5 days for the programs to be captioned, said the Association of Late-Deafened Adults, California Coalition of Agencies Serving the Deaf and Hard of Hearing, Cerebral Palsy and Deaf Organization, Deaf and Hard of Hearing Consumer Advocacy Network, Hearing Loss Association of America, National Association of the Deaf, and Telecommunications for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing. “As the Commission has made clear, there is no grace period for captioning for non-archival programming,” the complaint said. It said “Amazon’s violations are exacerbated by their apparent willfulness” because the company’s a member of the Digital Media Association, which unsuccessfully sought an 18-month delay of the Sept. 30 rules for some VPDs. Amazon and DiMA had no comment.

Programs that researchers tracked from when they aired on TV to when they appeared online on Amazon included: Fringe; CSI: NY; Law and Order: Special Victims Unit; and Revolution. “Each day, at least one and as many as eighteen of these programs were delivered by Amazon without captions,” the complaint said. Prof. Christian Vogler of Gallaudet University and Georgetown University’s Institute for Public Representation, representing the advocacy groups, tracked programs online. By looking at TV schedules and seeing what shows appeared on services like Amazon, Hulu and Netflix several days later during Oct. 1-7, the researchers attempted to see how much online content in a typical broadcast week got IP captions, Vogler told us. “We basically looked at everything on the television schedules."

"Most providers did really well,” Vogler said of his research, done pro bono for the groups and not ongoing. He’s head of the Technology Access Program at Gallaudet, a college in Washington with many deaf and hearing-impaired students. The seven groups “were really pleased to see that a lot of folks were complying” with the IP captioning order, said communications lawyer Blake Reid of the institute. “There were not a lot of problems in this testing.” Reid declined to disclose what if any communication the groups had with Amazon or other VPDs before filing the complaint and their research at the FCC and also complaining to the company. “We don’t think these are going to be a surprise to anyone,” he said of the findings.

NBCUniversal’s SyFy cable network, Hulu -- partly owned by Comcast’s NBCU, Disney and News Corp. -- and PBS were among the services mentioned by the research as lacking captions on some TV shows that later were put online. “We were unable to locate a single captioned program or caption controls on syfy.com,” said the research, filed in docket 11-154. “During the same period, we found captioned versions of Syfy programs delivered by other VPDs, including Google, Hulu, and Amazon.” Spokespeople for Hulu and NBCU had no comment by our deadline.

Two of the four PBS programs the research said lacked captions didn’t need them, and one hadn’t aired on the network, a spokeswoman said. Built on the principle “of universal service, PBS works to ensure that all Americans, including those who are deaf or hard of hearing, have access to our on-air and online content,” she said. “A significant percentage of our content is closed captioned and we are actively partnering with our producers and stations to both comply with FCC requirements and expand our closed captioning offerings.” Two of the PBS programs, which are captioned on the organization’s website and on iOS devices, were seen by researchers on Android-based smartphones, the spokeswoman said: “Mobile platforms are experiencing issues across the industry” in terms of captioning.

"Systemic problems” found in the advocates’ research were a “widespread inability of web browsers on mobile devices to render captions,” and some captions had low quality, the filing said. Most browsers, smartphones and tablets don’t display captions, it said. “While many VPD websites include the ability to enable captions when accessed through desktop and laptop computer web browsers, they lack that same ability when accessed via mobile web browsers.” The “widespread absence of captions on mobile browsers” appears to be because HTML5 video doesn’t support captions, the filing said.