Digital Television Transition Forum - Part One

By Cheryl Heppner

October 2009

Editor: Folks who are interested in the technical side of hearing loss solutions love the biennial TDI Convention. Cheryl Heppner hosted a Digital Television Transition Forum at the 2009 convention, and it was every bit as informative as you would expect it to be. And she wrote it up so we could all benefit from it!

This is Part One of Five Parts

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Part One

Part Two

Part Three

Part Four

Part Five

I had the pleasure of pulling together and moderating a panel of experts for the first plenary session of the TDI Conference on July 30, 2009. The topic was the digital television transition and where we are now in the digital television landscape, with captioning as the particular focus. Here's a recap of the workshop.

Pamela Holmes, Consumer

Pam Holmes was a panelist at the digital television and captioning workshop held at the TDI Conference in California in 2007. There she showed a video clip and talked about some problems she was experiencing with digital captioning. Curious about how her television captioning experience back then compare with those she has today, I asked her to present an update for the forum. Pam came with a series of home movie clips she filmed recently to document her current captioning problems. She focused on problems that she had heard were being experienced not just in her state of Wisconsin but also in California, Texas, Alabama, Florida, New Jersey, New York and elsewhere.

Two years ago Pam was seeing mostly captions where two lines were overlaid. Since then, without making any changes to her TV setup, the problem went away. Now she is seeing problems she has never seen before. These problems included delayed captions, garbled captions, captions that are missing letters or words, and lines of captions that run right off the screen.

As the saying goes, "a picture is worth a thousand words" and by that measure Pam's videos were worth about 8,000 words. There were clips of weird captions from Good Morning America, the Michael Jackson memorial service, and several more programs. After showing each clips, Pam asked the audience if they had experienced the same problem. The show of hands clearly showed she was not alone.

Pam concluded her presentation by saying that her questions as a consumer was what initiatives are happening to solve these issues, and whether the Federal Communication Commission (FCC) technical working group to study digital closed captioning would address them. She noted that many consumers had stopped complaining about their problems with closed captioning because they had become discouraged that their complaints did not bring results. She also wanted to learn whether there is a requirement that captioning be accurate and properly portray what is being shown.

Christopher Soukup, CSD

CSD Digital Transition Help Desk

Chris Soukup shared some of the results from CSD's work over the past nine months, working in collaboration with the FCC to provide a help center for consumers who are deaf or hard of hearing. The CSD Digital Transition Help Desk had a marketing and outreach campaign to create awareness of the digital TV transition and possible issues stemming from it. CSD created a comprehensive website on the digital TV transition with information in English, American Sign Language, Spanish and Spanish ASL. Their other creation was a national help center to provide consumers with live support.

Over the nine months the help desk was in operation, it interacted with consumers in three different categories. The first group of consumers were people who were frightened and confused by the information they were seeing about the DTV transition and unsure of what they were going to need.

The second group were consumers who had issues with equipment such as their converter box or television set, or had a problem with their service provider. Many of these consumers were able to successfully resolve their problems after viewing the instructional videos on the CSD website or by interacting with a live person at the help desk.

The third group of consumers had issues with captioning. This led CSD to create a national captioning survey with input from the FCC, National Center for Accessible Media, National Association of the Deaf and Hearing Loss Association of America. The survey was on the help desk's website and has had over 2,000 responses.

All of those responding to the survey had some type of captioning issue. Half of them had captioning problems all of the time. Sixty five percent had experienced out of sync audio, where the captions didn't match what they were seeing onscreen.

Cathy Seidel, Federal Communications Commission

Chief, Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau

Cathy Seidel noted that the Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau at the FCC houses the Disability Rights Office. The FCC recognized early in its planning for the digital TV transition that there would be several key groups that should be targeted for education about what the transition was, why it was being done, when it would occur, and what to do to prepare for it. One of the groups targeted was people with disabilities.

The FCC partnered with the industry, government agencies, service organizations, and nonprofit organizations to reach consumers about the transition. They awarded contracts for additional education to organizations like CSD and had call center representatives at the FCC who also answered questions from individuals who are deaf or hard of hearing. In addition to questions about captioning, these individuals had issues that were the same as others nationwide such as how to install their converter box.

The FCC has had an open docket for a while to look at various captioning issues. In November 2008 they released a declaratory ruling clarifying that providers, broadcasters, and other program distributors were required to provide captioning with digital television just the same as they would with analog television unless they were covered by other exemptions. The FCC also asked in this proceeding for further comments on some technical or quality issues with captioning. Comments that were received are still being analyzed, and Cathy said this is a priority issue for the FCC.

Acting Chairman Copps established the technical working group comprised of many talented people who are very versed in captioning issues on the consumer side as well as the industry side, whether it's software, programming, cable, equipment, or another issue. It can be very hard to identify where a captioning problem lies. The working group will be identifying technical issues and determining or making recommendations to resolve those problems. It may require education or development of best practices or a streamlined way to report problems.

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

Part Four

Part Five

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