Coping

U.S. Senate Passes Twenty-First Century Communications And Video Accessibility Act Of 2010 By Unanimous Consent

The U.S. Senate passed the 21st Century Communications and video Accessibility Act (S. 3304) by unanimous consent, virtually assuring that the disability rights act guaranteeing access by deaf, hard-of-hearing, blind and vision-impaired consumers to all forms of media will become law.

Passage was expected after the U.S. House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved its version of the same bill, H.R. 3101, last week, and now all that is required is reconciliation of the two bills, a final vote in the House and President Obama’s signature. In what House sponsor Rep. Edward Markey has called “online ramps to the Internet” for people with disabilities, the new law will, among many other things:

• Require captioned television programs to be captioned when delivered over the Internet.
• Authorize the FCC to require 7 hours per week of TV video description for vision-impaired people on the top 4 network channels and top 5 cable channels nationwide.
• Allocate up to $10 million per year for communications equipment used by individuals who are deaf-blind.
• Require devices of any size to be capable of displaying closed captioning, delivering available video description, and making emergency information accessible.
• Require accessible user controls for televisions and set-top boxes, and easy access to closed captioning and video description.

The new law is a huge step forward for people with disabilities in an age when equal access to Internet services is an absolute must for anyone to successfully earn a living and enjoy the quality of life that other accommodations have enabled ever since passage of the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) 20 years ago.

Big Movie Theater Chains See Writing On Wall And Start To Provide More Closed Captions

On the same day that the U.S. Justice Department was asking for comments on a proposed rule requiring movie theaters to provide closed captions for hard-of-hearing customers along with audio descriptions for blind theatergoers, Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley was finalizing an agreement with three of the biggest movie theater chains to dramatically increase accessibility options at movie theaters throughout the state.

It’s no coincidence that the major theater chains are finally agreeing to provide more accessibility services at the same time the government is making noises about strengthening its mandates. In Massachusetts, the agreement was a settlement of a formal civil rights complaint brought by deaf and blind residents alleging discrimination because of the absence of accessible technology.

The Justice Department put theater owners on notice it was considering changing its regulations under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) to mandate closed captioning and audio descriptions at all theater locations. In a notice published in the Federal Register, the Justice Department noted the slow progress the industry had made in providing accessibility options in spite of advances in technology making captioning and audio descriptions easier than in the past:

The Department is concerned about what appears to be a significant disconnect between the production of movies that have captioning and video description capabilities and the actual exhibition or availability of such movies to individuals with sensory disabilities. The Department also is concerned that even when captioned and video described movies are exhibited, their showings appear to be relegated to the middle of the week or midday showings.

The publication of the notice about the proposed rule change is the start of a three-to-six month process that will include comments by all parties, hearings, and ultimately a decision to revise the regulations or maintain the status quo.

The consent agreement in Massachusetts may indicate which way the political winds are blowing and presage similar agreement to increase accessibility nationally. Read more

After A Five-Year Wait, CapTel Real-Time Captioned Telephone Service Is Finally Available In Massachusetts

Nearly five years ago, I wrote, “I’m still a CapTel wannabee.” That was when the 32 states in the U.S. that had already approved the captioned telephone service did not yet include my home state of Massachusetts. Today I’m happy to say the wait is over. Starting on August 1, Hamilton Telecommunications will start providing its Hamilton CapTel service to residents of Massachusetts.

The CapTel captioned telephone service provides real-time captions of telephone conversations displayed on your phone. Users conference in a relay-service operator to provide a computer-aided transcription, which appears on an LCD display on their phones.

Why the long wait in Massachusetts? Politics, as usual. Enabling legislation was required to pave the way for the service, and our state legislature was slow off the mark. (Maybe that’s one of the reasons Massachusetts’ famed “Route 128 Technology Corridor” is a shadow of its former self these days.) The good news though is that I’ve been able to use another CapTel service for a while now, ever since the WebCapTel service went online. With WebCaptel, you don’t need a special phone but use your Internet connection instead to display the captions, and it works well. You can use it with your desktop or portable computer, or even with your iPhone. Web CapTel is available from Sprint WebCapTel as well as from Hamilton WebCapTel.

But even though I’m happy with the WebCapTel service, I’m sorely tempted to buy the CapTel phone manufactured by Ultratec and sign up for the service. It looks like a slick product that would be fun to use. In any case, being able to “see what they say” is the best way to avoid all those costly errors you must endure when a poor phone connection or a bad hearing day makes it impossible to get through a normal phone call.

U.S. House Passage Of Telecommunications Access Act Brings Universal Closed Captioning And Other Services A Giant Step Closer

The U.S. House of Representatives’ passage of H.R. 3101, the 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act, was a huge bi-partisan(348 to 23) vote of confidence in the commitment of our society to support the right of equal access to commonly used public services — especially the airwaves and Internet — no matter what disabilities a citizen might have. The vote, on the 20th anniversary of the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, ensures equal access for deaf, hard-of-hearing, and blind consumers to the media.

For hard-of-hearing people, it requires that TV programs distributed on the web provide closed captions, that remote controls have a button to easily access closed captioning on broadcast and pay TV, and that telecom equipment used to make calls over the internet be compatible with hearing aids, just as land line phones and cell phones must be hearing aid compatible. Mandating more captioning of popular web videos will bring the day of universal closed captioning in all media a huge step closer.

“Two decades ago, Americans with disabilities couldn’t get around if buildings weren’t wheelchair accessible; today it’s about being Web accessible. The ADA mandated physical ramps into buildings,” said U.S. Rep. Edward Markey (D-MA), the sponsor of the legislation. “Today, individuals with disabilities need online ramps to the Internet so they can get to the Web from wherever they happen to be.”

The U.S. Senate version of the bill, S.3304, the Equal Access to 21st Century Communications Act, has been introduced by Senator Mark Pryor (D-AR) and reported out by the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation. Given the overwhelming support in the House, prospects for passage in the Senate and the President signing a combined version of the bill into law are good. Both the House and Senate versions also provide many protections for blind Americans, including audible descriptions of on-screen action on television and making cable TV program guides and selection menus accessible to people with vision loss.

An Official Complaint About Poor Video Captions Is Actually A Vote For Better Captions — Make Your Vote Count!

Everyone who needs open or closed captions to understand the TV, DVDs and web videos knows captioning services in general could stand substantial improvement. Ever since the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) mandated captioning for almost all television shows, many hard-of-hearing people have come to depend on them. On my home set I keep the “CC1″ setting on all the time. But that doesn’t mean the captions always work. In fact, as often as not the captions provided by broadcasters — especially for talk shows, the news, or other live broadcasts — are woefully delayed or infuriatingly wrong. But I recently realized that bellyaching to family and friends was not going to result in better captions, and I discovered there’s a better way to complain. You can start with the FCC itself — there’s a simple online form on the FCC.gov web site that makes it easy to detail your complaint. The form has room for plenty of information, so make sure you jot down the specific problem you experienced, at what time, on what station, and with what television show. And make sure you have the contact information for your cable or broadcast service provider. Read more

Live Captions of Your Phone Conversations Are Now Available On Your iPhone From Hamilton Web CapTel

Hamilton Web CapTel has introduced Mobile CapTel, an iPhone app enabling you to get live, real-time captions of telephone conversations you are having on your iPhone. Web CapTel is an amazing, free service available to anyone in the U.S.  It lets you get real-time captions over the web for any phone conversation you may have. You sign up for a free Web Captel account and, when you make a phone call, let the Hamilton relay service know you want a captioned call. Their captioning expert, aided by voice-recognition software, listens in and supplies the live captions of your conversation on your computer screen.

The new Hamilton Mobile Captel service, currently available on any 3G/3GS iPhone, shows the captions on the iPhone screen. Users download the Mobile Captel iPhone application from Apple’s iPhone App Store and use it to log onto their Web Captel accounts. Because the service works with iPhone-compatible headsets (either wired or Bluetooth), you can speak and hear while looking at the screen in your hand. Read more

Looking For A Movie And A Theater With Closed Captions? Captionfish Will Find It For You

Finally someone has done something very obvious and necessary, but also very difficult, that hard-of-hearing consumers have been awaiting for years. Captionfish is a website providing comprehensive listings of closed-captioned movies at theaters all over the United States. It is a sophisticated search engine that finds open captioned, “rear-window” captioned, subtitled, and descriptively narrated movies along with zip-code locating of theaters closest to your home.

This is no easy feat and it took a team of developers with some pretty impressive credentials to make it work so well. DeafCode LLC was founded by Brendan Gramer, Chris Sano and Greg Millam, who all have three things in common: each of them is deaf, each of them is an experienced programmer, and they all have a sense of humor (from their web site: “We’re a bunch of deaf geeks. Seriously. Geeky.”) Brendan works at Amazon, Chris works at Microsoft, and Greg works at Google. Talk about having the bases covered!

I’ve used the service and it works well, alleviating my frustration at the listings in the newspapers and online which usually, at best, only identify which theaters offer captions without saying which specific movies offer the captioning or what kind of captioning they provide. Captionfish shows you which movies are playing in theaters near you and exactly what kinds of captioning they have. Read more

How Google, Congress and Marlee Matlin Will Make Universal Video Captioning Inevitable For The Web, Television And Movies

Universal captioning of videos on the web, television, in the movies and everywhere else video can be shown may still be a long time coming, but it is definitely on its way. Propelled by a combination of new technology developments, political advocacy, legislative action, court rulings, and the marketplace laws of supply and demand, universal captioning of videos is inevitable. The movement, which got its first big push in the 1990s when the Federal Communications Commission required television broadcasters to provide closed captioning, has recently gotten a burst of new energy. When the government was slow to regulate the explosion of digital video on the web, the momentum for captioning stalled for a while. But now a new wave of advocacy, aided by Google’s desire to extend its web search technology to every nook and cranny of the globe, is making the dream of universal captioning come true. Read more

« Previous Page — Next Page »