American groups call for universal television captioning

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Monday, 7 February 2011 12:40pm

US Deaf and hearing impaired and disability advocacy groups have filed a petition with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for television to be fully captioned.

The American Association of the Deaf-Blind, the American Association of People with Disabilities, the Association of Late-Deafened Adults and the Hearing Loss Association of America are among the groups asking the FCC to remove several rules allowing exemptions for TV captioning, including exemptions for:

  • Late night programming
  • Commercial and political advertising
  • Locally produced non-news programming
  • Interstitials (short television programming), promotional announcements and public service announcements
  • Channels producing revenues under US$3 million annually

The groups also called for captioning using the ‘electronic newsroom technique’ (where the only captioning displayed is from a pre-written script and does not produce accurate captions) not to be counted towards compulsory captioning quotas, and for an exemption order made in 2006 to be removed.

For more information, visit the Coalition of Organisations for Accessible Technology website.


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