American Council of the Blind Says FCC Can’t Rely on VPAAC for Objectivity
The FCC’s Video Programming Accessibility Advisory Committee (VPAAC) working groups were too heavily influenced by industry executives, who were over-represented on the panels, the American Council of the Blind (ACB) said in reply comments filed with the FCC this week (http://xrl.us/bncc9u). The group urged the FCC to be skeptical of the committee’s conclusions. It also complained that the companies and trade associations represented on the committee were not interested in reaching solutions. “The advisory reports are ultimately weak and unbalanced,” the ACB said. “We must urge, in the most strenuous terms, that the Commission look to the reports as mostly representing one side,” it said. FCC staff did a “commendable” job of raising potential solutions during VPAAC meetings, but few of those appeared to make it into the final reports, the ACB said.
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Membership among the working groups heavily favored industry executives, putting consumer advocates at a disadvantage, the ACB said. Moreover, those industry representatives frequently asserted that potential solutions proposed by consumer advocates in the committee were unfeasible, the ACB said. “Advocates, while quite knowledgeable about the end solutions needed in order to attain true accessibility, did not possess sufficient technical background to challenge industry contentions,” that their proposals were unworkable, it said. “It became clear to us from the inception of the VPAAC that many representatives from the consumer electronics industry had no intention of working in a collaborative fashion,” it said. “Most of the industry personnel appointed to the advisory committee, rather than being made available to provide true solutions to the challenges, served as nothing else than constant reminders as to how solutions could not be possible."
The Missouri Council of the Blind raised similar concerns. “It should be noted that this industry has been one of the most hostile toward improving the ability to reach out to the blind and visually impaired community,” it said (http://xrl.us/bncda3). “It is clear from this report that such resistance is still a dominant reality,” it said. “We urge the FCC to take this into account as they consider future actions."
Advocates for the deaf largely limited their reply comments to a discussion of statutory terms (http://xrl.us/bncdca). “We are very concerned the industry will unreasonably stretch the term ‘reasonable comparable’ to become a loose standard unless there is some reasonably clear guidance,” the National Association of the Deaf, Telecommunications for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing and other advocates said. “The Commission should provide clear guidance,” on how far the term “can be stretched but still meet the intent” of the Consumer Video Accessibility Act, they said.