From Mary Watkins of the Media Access Group at WGBH:

TV viewers who rely on captioning and/or video description may be encountering problems with both as we transition to digital television (DTV). Today, May 18, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) holds the first meeting of the new “DTV Closed Captioning and Video Description Working Group” which will focus on the many technical problems pertaining to proper delivery and display of captioning and description in DTV. WGBH’s director of Media Access, Larry Goldberg, has been a driving force behind this initiative, motivated by complaints from viewers around the country and requests for help from companies along the entire TV distribution chain. The FCC and the entire industry—from broadcast and cable networks to local cable companies to professional and consumer DTV equipment manufacturers—now recognize this is an industry-wide problem, and will be joining in this effort.

In the meantime, here are some caption problems folks may see, all of which are due to the transition (and not to caption vendor error):

· Lack of captions or garbled captions on HD channels

· HD set top box stripping or garbling captions on HD channels

· Captions readable by digital-to-analog converter boxes not being transmitted

· Problems receiving captions through digital-to-analog converter boxes or multi-channel VPD set-top boxes

· Overlapping captions (two lines of captions displayed over each other)

· Captions flashing on and off

· Captions that inadvertently switch to text mode, causing 95% of the screen image to be obscured.

The FCC has an established area of its site devoted to access issues. Here is the URL to an index of those pages, with links:

http://www.fcc.gov/cgb/dro/links.html

More information, and improved cc and dvs, to come.

Best,

Mary Watkins
Director of Communications and Outreach
Media Access Group at WGBH

This article was posted by Carol in category Hearing Loss/Deafness