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internet captioning for people with hearing loss

Captioning on the Internet? You bet!  Now that there is so much audio and streaming video on the Internet, captions are required to provide communications access to people with hearing loss. The bad news is that there is a lot of content out there that is not captioned. The good news is that there's much more captioned content now than there was even a few months ago, and captioned content will continue to increase.

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March 2013 - Another Milestone Coming for Internet TV Captioning

December 2012 - Amazon Cited for Failing to Provide Internet Captioning

December 2012 - New Captioning Rules to Take Effect

October 2012 - FCC Requirements for Captioning of Internet Video Programming

October 2012 - Amazon Begins Captioning Streaming Video Library

October 2012 - Netflix and NAD Agree to 100% Captioning on Streaming Content

October 2012 - Hearing loss advocate says new captioning rules fall short

Sept 2012 - Online Coverage of Political Conventions Lacks Captioning

August 2012 - FCC Requires Online TV Content to be Captioned Starting in September 2012

July 2012 - Closed Captioning Not Provided on Streaming Media

July 2012 - Captioning of Internet Video Programming

June 2012 - Netflix may have to provide closed captions online

June 2012 - Federal Court Ruling May Require Netflix Streaming Captions

April 2012 - Compliance Deadlines Set for FCC Online Video Closed Captioning Rules

April 2012 - New Closed Captioning Software for Ultraviolet Disc-To-Digital Video

March 2012 - YouTube Improves Captions

March 2012 - Technology Encourages Captioning Service for College Campuses

March 2012 - CNN Must Face Lawsuit on Captioned Online Videos

January 2012 - FCC Releases Television IP Captioning Rules

October 2011 - Court Reporters Push for Higher Standards in Internet Captioning

July 2011 - It's Easier Now for Federal Agencies to Provide Captioning

June 2011 - NAD Files Disability Civil Rights Lawsuit Against Netflix

May 2011 - SMPTE Makes Closed-Captioning Standard Freely Available

March 2011 - Zediva Introduces Online Movie Rental Service for New Releases

October 2010 - Court Reporters Ready to Help with Closed Captioning for New Disability Act

January 2010 - YouTube Adds Automatic "Captioning"

January 2010 - Captioned Internet Videos -- An Emerging Issue and Initial Success

November 2009 - Google and YouTube: Leading the Way for Internet Captioning

July 2009 - COAT Applauds Representative Markey's  Accessibility Bill

September 2008 - Captioned YouTube?

September 2008 - American Experience "The Presidents" Downloads have Closed Captioning and Video Description

August 2008 - YouTube Has Speech-to-Text Functionality...and it Works

June 2008 - Goldberg Testimony on Markey Bill

June 2008 - 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act Introduced

June 2008 - Markey Bill Explained in Simple Language

May 2008 - DigitalChalk Partners with IBM to Automate Closed Captioning for Video Training

March 2008 - CNET Unveils CNET TV 2.0 With Closed Captioning

March 2008 - XOrbit Announces Direct-to-MPEG Closed Captioning Solution

March 2008 - Captioned Web Videos from BBC

December 2007 - Tom Harkin's web videos to be captioned!

December 2007 - Proposed Legislation Promotes Accessibility

October 2007 - Organizations Promote Online Media Captions

March 2007 - WGBH Creates Tool For Captioning Flash Media

March 2007 - Automatic Sync Technologies Makes Captioning Easy for Adobe Flash

July 2006 - Guidelines for Creating Accessible Digital Materials Published by WGBH/NCAM

July 2006 - AOL Announces Closed Captions for Online Video

March 2006 - Here's Cheryl Heppner's great article on captioning Internet video.

January 2006 - If you think that captioning on the Internet is not an important issue, you should read this post from Jamie Berke, who hosts the About:Deafness/HOH site.

November 2005 - The disability community has a long history of fighting for access in the fields of telecommunications, television, etc; and it has done a remarkable job of ensuring that access is required. Now, however, many of these services are moving to the Internet, where there none of the existing legislation applies. Here's a press release from the NAD that discusses this critical issue!

October 2003 - Here's a report on the Captioning on the Internet workshop at the 2003 TDI Convention. The presenter was Linda Idoni, the director of the West Coast office of the Media Access Group (MAG) at WGBH.

October 2003 - AOL has just announced that they will be captioning some of their streaming media. This is wonderful news for people with hearing loss.  Hopefully other content providers will follow suit.

October 2003 - OK, so we're seeing some progress on ensuring that multimedia on the internet is captioned. But what about eBooks? Here's the latest on eBook accessibility!

September 2003 - So what's up with Multimedia on the Web? Is it going to be accessible to people with hearing loss? Judy Brewer, the Director of the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) at the WWW Consortium (W3C) gives us her thoughts.

December 2002 - The Captioned Media Program announces Captioned Educational Streaming Video on the Internet. Now you can visit their website and view captioned educational videos RIGHT NOW!

October 2002 - Court Rules Web Need Not be Accessible - This article is about a court decision that websites need not be accessible to the blind, but the same reasoning applies to captioning Internet videos.

November 2001 - e-Media and Wordwave cooperate to provide captions on live webcasts.

July 2001 - MovieFlix and the Captioned Media Program are working to add captions to the streaming internet movies provided by MovieFlix. So if you have a reasonably fast connection, you can now view captioned streaming movies over the internet.

January 2001 - If you're interested in the upcoming inauguration ball, and are concerned that lack of captioning will make it inaccessible to you, you might want to watch it on the web. TVWorldwide.com recently announced that they will provide captioned streaming video coverage of that event

October 2000 - One of the recent developments on the internet is the advent of captioned videos. An organization called AbleTV is now providing  captioned videos of news events.

July 2000 - People with hearing loss find instant messaging to be a great resource, because you can use it despite your hearing loss. Or at least, you could. Read about Voice-Enabled Instant Messaging from Microsoft.

April 2000 - The FCC provided internet captioning for their April 28th public forum. How did they do it and how successful was it?

November 1999 - Sign World TV is an innovative organization that "broadcasts" over the Internet, and all their programming is both captioned and interpreted.

WGBH in Boston has developed software that allows folks to caption videos in a variety of formats. And it's available for the very favorable price of FREE. Here's MAGpie.

More on this and related topics

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Another Milestone Coming for Internet TV Captioning

March 2013

First, a quick reminder: Next month is a very important milestone for internet captioning law. By March 30, 2013, live and near-live video programming must be captioned online if it is shown on regular TV. The exact language from the Federal Communications Commission consumer guide is reproduced below:

"Live and near-live video programming must be captioned on the Internet if it is shown on TV with captions on or after March 30, 2013. Near-live video programming is defined as programming that is performed and recorded less than 24 hours before being shown on TV for the first time."

An example of this type of programming is Dateline NBC. Dateline NBC is partially live, and the captioning is done live on regular television.

Full Story

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Amazon Cited for Failing to Provide Internet Captioning

December 2012

Today several deaf and hard of hearing consumer groups filed a complaint at the FCC against Amazon for allegedly violating new FCC Internet captioning requirements. These consumers aver that Amazon.com has violated numerous times the FCC's new rules issued under the 21st CVAA. Television shown online without the captioning included top programs such as "Fringe," "CSI: NY," "Law and Order: Special Victims Unit," and "Revolution." The new rules state that beginning on September 30, 2012, most full-length, non-live video programming published or exhibited on television with captions must also include closed captions when delivered online. They say that Amazon has consistently failed to caption its online video programming in a timely fashion, sometimes taking more than twenty days after posting a program online to provide captions. The complaint urged the FCC to impose the maximum fines and injunctive sanctions on Amazon to ensure that other distributors will make their programming accessible immediately instead of violating the rules as a cost of doing business. The consumer complaint also noted the willful nature of Amazon's failure to caption these previously-captioned programs on TV; they reminded the FCC that the company was a participant in the FCC's own Video Programming Accessibility Advisory Committee ("VPAAC") which met repeatedly after passage of the new law in 2010 to develop standards for how to implement IP captioning, so any defense of lack of awareness or of insufficient time was not appropriate. Full Story

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New Captioning Rules to Take Effect

December 2012

FCC rules require that, as of March 30, 2013, TV broadcasters must begin providing Closed Captions on programs that are streamed live (or "near-live") on the internet simultaneously as they air on television. This rule, for example, would affect stations that live stream their daily news casts. This requirement was adopted by the FCC as a result of the Twenty-First Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act of 2010 (CVAA.) In January 2012, the FCC adopted rules implementing the CVAA's provisions governing Internet Protocol (IP) closed captioning. Among other things, these rules established deadlines for captioning of IP programming that first aired on television with captions. The Rules apply to full length programs only, not clips. The first deadline was September 30, 2012 for pre-recorded programming not edited for IP distribution. March 30, 2013 is the deadline for captioning of live or near-live programming and for pre-recorded programming edited for Internet distribution the deadline is September 30, 2013. There are also deadlines for archived IP programming stretching out to March 2016 that must be captioned once those programs air on TV with captions.  Full Story

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Amazon Begins Captioning Streaming Video Library

October 2012

Amazon has quietly started to add closed captioning services to its Instant Video library, following a September 30 deadline from the Federal Communications Commission that required online media companies to begin incorporating these subtitles for the hard of hearing into their video content.  This regulation - an implementation of the 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act of 2011 - has been long in the making, with companies like Amazon and YouTube but also Apple arguing that they will need extensions to fully comply, and those arguing on behalf of people with hearing disabilities saying that digital content needs to be just as accessible as what people can see in analog. The September 30 deadline is the first in a series for closed caption compliance.  Full Story

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Hearing loss advocate says new captioning rules fall short

October 2012

Many deaf activists are calling the new Federal Communication Commission (FCC) rulings on closed captioning a step forward, but complain that there are too many loopholes, says the Washington Times. The 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act (CVAA) requires producers to add closed captioning to TV and website programming for people with hearing loss.

Some of the issues are:

* The new closed captioning law requirements only apply to regular, full-length television shows on TV or the Internet

* The law does not apply to Internet shows on websites such as Hulu News

* Broadcasters must caption full-length newscasts on TV or live streams but are not required to caption short video clips  Full Story

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Online Coverage of Political Conventions Lacks Captioning

Sept 2012

Online streaming was supposed to make the 2012 conventions more accessible to the public than ever before. But for the 48 million Americans who are deaf or hard of hearing, the latest technology isn't quite as good as ordinary TV. No major media outlets provided live online closed captioning of the Republican National Convention this week in Tampa, Fla. At the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, N.C., the only Internet feed that will carry real-time captioning will be the Democratic Party's own online hub. Unlike on television, where outlets are required by law to encode subtitles, Internet content providers don't have to do the same - even if it's the same material shown with captions on TV. "We believe that this content should be captioned and we encourage our consumers to advocate for closed captioning because it is the right thing to do," two leading advocates wrote to POLITICO in a statement.  Full Story

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FCC Requires Online TV Content to be Captioned Starting in September 2012

August 2012

TV networks and web video sites will have to start providing closed captions for any TV content available online by the end of September, the FCC ruled a few days ago. The ruling reaffirmed the Twenty-First Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act of 2010, which was signed into law by President Obama in October of 2010, as well as an FCC ruling from earlier this year. However, the industry got a bit of a break, with the FCC ruling that they won't have to provide customizable captions until early 2014. Captions for web video have been a bit of a hot button issue for some time: Disability advocates have been arguing that web video providers aren't doing enough to make their clips accessible to disabled viewers, and have actually sued both CNN and Netflix over missing captions.  Full Story

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Closed Captioning Not Provided on Streaming Media

July 2012

Back in February 2011, Netflix said "subtitles" were available on 3,500 TV episodes and movies, which together account for roughly 30 percent of the site's available viewing. The company said it expected to reach 80 percent of viewing coverage by the end of 2011-but it does not appear to have updated subscribers on its progress toward this goal in the 17 months since. (Shows with subtitles are listed on this not terribly user-friendly page.) The problem is the subtitles are visible on computers and on devices such as phones and tablets but not on all gadgets that stream Netflix output to your television.*The issue is technical, the company claims. It's the "closed" part of the name-the ability to choose whether the captions are visible-that makes it tricky. Computers-and devices like iPhones and iPads-can handle the complex "encoding" software, whereas smart TVs and set-top boxes may or may not have the processing power to do so. (Hulu users are in the same fix. Closed captions are available on "some" of its shows for online viewing and via a limited number of Internet-connected devices.) Full Story

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Netflix may have to provide closed captions online

June 2012

A federal judge has taken a step toward requiring Netflix to provide closed-captioning for the deaf on its video-streaming website, ruling that federal disability laws cover businesses that serve their customers online. Netflix, headquartered in Los Gatos, is the dominant provider of movies and TV programs on the Internet, with more than 20 million subscribers. The National Association for the Deaf accused the company of violating the law by withholding closed-captioning from most of the videos on its "Watch Instantly" on-demand website. Netflix sought to dismiss the suit, arguing that the Americans with Disabilities Act requires accommodations for the disabled only in stores and other physical structures - an argument accepted in the past by some courts, including the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco. On Tuesday, however, U.S. District Judge Michael Ponsor of Springfield, Mass., said the law prohibits discrimination in any venue, including the Internet.  Full Story

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CNN Must Face Lawsuit on Captioned Online Videos

March 2012

A California judge has rejected CNN's attempt to dismiss a lawsuit brought by The Greater Los Angeles Agency on Deafness (GLAD) over the news organization's refusal to caption videos uploaded to its website. CNN raised a First Amendment objection to the suit, opening up an intriguing battle. On one side, a media organization's unequivocal right to free speech. On the other, the plaintiffs' incontrovertible right to have equal access to the product of free speech. GLAD sued in June, prompting CNN to file an anti-SLAPP motion. Under California's anti-SLAPP statute, defendants are allowed to strike a complaint if the lawsuit is an attempt to interfere with the furtherance of free speech on a matter of public interest. CNN argued that all of its activities as a news agency are in furtherance of its free speech rights. GLAD objected. The group said it would be one thing if this was a libel or privacy case. But to interpret the anti-SLAPP statute this broadly, the group argued, would mean a pass from legal obligations "whenever the defendant is a news corporation or when defendant's acts are in any way connected to speech."  Full Story

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Compliance Deadlines Set for FCC Online Video Closed Captioning Rules

April 2012

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Report and Order (R&O) on Closed Captioning of Internet-Protocol-Delivered Video Programming appeared today in the Mar. 30, 2012 Federal Register. As described in our Closed Captioning Rules for Online Video Programming advisory, Federal Register publication of the R&O starts the clock toward compliance deadlines for certain of the new rules for the closed captioning of video programming delivered via Internet protocol (i.e., IP video), as required by the 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act (CVAA).  As discussed in our advisory on the CVAA and our overview of the Report by the Video Programming Accessibility Advisory Committee (VPAAC) making recommendations for FCC implementation, the CVAA compelled the FCC to adopt rules that require captioning of IP video programming that was published or exhibited with captions on TV after the effective date of such regulations (covered IP video). Publication of the R&O in the Federal Register establishes Apr. 30, 2012 as the effective date for the rules adopted therein. Thus, any video programming that appears on television with captions after Apr. 30, 2012, is covered IP video. Federal Register publication of the R&O also sets the deadlines for ensuring that such covered IP video appears online with captions as follows:   Full Story

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YouTube Improves Captions

March 2012

Captions on YouTube videos can't be all that exciting. It's been around since 2006. But apparently caption functionality has been widely extended, according to a blog post by YouTube. The video sharing platform that takes up half the work day for most of us has introduced new languages to YouTube's caption feature. Automatic captions and transcript synchronization are now available for Japanese, Korean and English, and there are over 155 supported languages for manual captions and subtitles. YouTube rentals will also start telling you what subtitles are available to you before you rent. Channel owners will also now have support for their chosen format when it comes to broadcast video captions. In other words, text will be seen in its original position and style, and can be placed near the speaker, italicized to indicate off-camera voice over, or even set to scroll if the captions were generated in real-time model. Of course, we're looking for videos on YouTube more often than we're posting them (in most cases). That said, YouTube has added a new search option for closed captions. Simply add ", cc" to any search or click Filter > CC.  Full Story