It’s About Time: Entire 2011 Super Bowl Broadcast AND All Its Advertisements Will Have Closed Captioning

After years of intense lobbying by the entire hard-of-hearing community, the National Association of the Deaf (NAD) has gotten a commitment from the National Football League (NFL) and FOX Broadcasting to provide closed captions for the entire Super Bowl XLV broadcast this Sunday—including all advertisements that will be aired.

Everyone knows the Super Bowl is more than a football game. In fact, in the Madison Avenue circles where I used to move, it’s more a Super Bowl of advertising than an athletic contest. It’s where the most creative minds in media and entertainment show off their best and brightest ideas every year. That’s why when I lost most of my hearing, it enraged me that so few of the ads had captions. Read more

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

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

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

More Courts Should Provide ‘CART’ Real-Time Video Transcription Services

I was excused from jury duty today after I told the officer at the reception desk that none of their amplification schemes, even the portable listening devices they provide as an accommodation for people with hearing loss, would work for me. I told him I’d be happy to serve if they could provide CART service–communications access real-time transcription–where they wheel a TV monitor into court and provide real-time video captioning of the proceedings. But they still don’t provide that service in the Massachusetts Superior Court House where I was called to serve.

CART systems have been around for many years and have long been recognized by the federal government as a “reasonable accommodation” under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). So it’s disappointing and a little surprising that CART service isn’t yet a standard accommodation for hard-of-hearing people called to jury duty. Read more

Let’s Boycott Super Bowl Advertisers Who Don’t Supply Captions

What do BlockBuster, Burger King, Kentucky Fried Chicken and Expedia.com have in common? Their Super Bowl ads this year didn’t have captions. They must not want our business. Captionless ads have been bothering me ever since I began noticing how many advertisers don’t supply them, even after the first of the year when the FCC began requiring broadcasters to caption all their regular programming. The number of captionless ads on SuperBowl XL was especially disappointing. Read more

A Night at the Theater

Usually a trip to the theater is frustrating because getting any of the dialogue is such a challenge. Even the headphones available in larger theaters most often don’t do the job for me. But last weekend I went to see my friend Steve Cooper play a leading role in Blinders, a political satire put on by the Out of the Blue Theater Company at the Boston Playwrights’ Theater. The company is staffed by both veteran and up-and-coming actors in a small, intimate theater next to the campus of Boston University. And this time, I had two things going for me that made going to the theater enjoyable again. Read more