Captioned FCC Forum
April 2000
Editor: Awhile ago we published a short article on internet
captioning and promised that we would keep an eye on this emerging
technology. The first application I've seen is a public forum by the FCC
on April 28, 2000. In their press release, they asked for our opinion of
this technology, so I sent them an email describing my experience. Their
press release is provided below, followed by my email to
them.
Contact information for the captioned FCC Forums and other FCC
resources is provided on the FCC
Page in the Resource Directory.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The Federal Communications Commission held a public forum today,
April 28, 2000 from 10-11:15 am, EST. For persons not able to attend the
forum in person, we broadcasted the meeting via Real Audio. To make the
internet broadcasting accessible to persons with hearing disabilities,
we tried a new in-house technology for real-time captioning on the
internet, via Real Video.
As many of you know, the FCC is committed to ensuring access to all
persons with disabilities, and has worked through three vendors in the
past to provide real-time internet captioning, all of which are no
longer providing this service. We would appreciate your comments on our
in-house trial of internet captioning.
The Disabilities Rights Office
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Dear FCC,
I was intrigued by a press release from the Disability Rights Office
regarding the captioning of the April 28 public forum, so I went to the
specified website and began viewing the file. I'm using a dialup
connection that typically connects at around 40 kbits per second.
I was very excited to see an image of the meeting room, and then an
image of a woman who appeared to be presenting. Next I heard her voice,
and finally I was thrilled to see the captions pop up.
Unfortunately, the captions were stuck on "Good Morning"
for the entire 5 minutes I watched. The video was also stuck at the
opening image of the speaker. But the audio was coming through just
fine. (It would be nice if a person could select to dedicate the
available bandwidth to the captions rather than the audio, but I think
you need to convince RealAudio to provide that feature.)
So I'd rate this as a wonderful idea that needs a little work on the
implementation. And it probably works fine for people with a high-speed
connection. Please continue to work on this technology. Internet
captioning is vital to people with hearing loss.
