Media Bureau Grants One, Denies Another DiMA Closed Captioning Waiver
The FCC’s Media Bureau granted a limited waiver of some Internet Protocol video closed captioning requirements sought by the Digital Media Association. But the bureau denied a separate waiver petition from DiMA that would have pushed back the deadline for requiring the “rendering” of captions under the Communications and Video Accessibility Act of 2010. In an order released Friday (http://xrl.us/bnk5h7), the bureau said the Sept. 30, 2012, captioning rendering deadline is consistent with the recommendations of the Video Programming Accessibility Advisory Committee and denied DiMA’s request to push it back to Jan. 1, 2014.
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"The grant of the DiMA Rendering Petition would cause captions to be entirely inaccessible to end users of certain IP-delivered video programming until January 1, 2014,” the order said. “This would not serve the public interest.” It granted DiMA’s petition to be let out of certain requirements that would let users adjust the contrast, color and background of IP video captions.
"We're obviously pleased that the rendering petition was dismissed,” Blake Reid, counsel to the Telecommunications for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing Inc. (TDI), told us. “That’s the core functionality that was at the heart of the CVAA’s requirements and the heart of the commission’s rulemaking process.” TDI lobbied against both petitions. But TDI is also very disappointed with the commission’s grant of DiMA’s petition to push back the deadline for complying with some of the technical requirements under Section 708 of the Communications Act, Reid said. “Those requirements are very important for the deaf-blind community and for other folks that need to be able to adjust the appearance of their captions to be able to read them,” he said. “That’s going to set back the accessibility goals of the CVAA for those folks by a year and a half.
DiMA said the waiver it was granted will help make sure that the users who want to adjust closed-captions “have a vastly improved experience,” after the new deadline. “With that said, we must also admit that we're disappointed with the FCC’s decision against relaxing the extremely tight deadline of its newly proposed ‘rending requirements,'” Lee Knife, the association’s executive director said in an e-mail. “Individuals with hearing impairments, as well as all consumers of online media, deserve the best online viewing experience possible, and today’s decision will likely make that less of a reality for everyone."
The CVAA Section 708 waiver applies to all video programming distributors and providers. “We agree with DiMA that a short-term waiver ... serves the public interest” and that a limited waiver would help avoid technical problems and consumer dissatisfaction with the technology, the order said. TDI “is looking at our options as to whether to seek review of that” provision of the order, Reid said. “We haven’t made any decision.” TDI was encouraged to see the commission granted the waiver under its general authority rather than individual petition waiver authority, Reid said. If the commission had used its individual waiver authority, it could have opened the door to a flood of waiver applications, he said. “They avoided that problem by using their general waiver authority.”