ACA Pushes For More Time To Comply With CVAA Accessibility Mandates

As the Federal Communications Commission prepares to release its implementation order on user guide accessibility rules the Communications and Video Accessibility Act, the American Cable Association is pushing the FCC for deadline waivers for more of its members, which are small and mid-sized cable operators.

The FCC already signaled it was likely to give two extra years to comply to cable systems with 400,000 or fewer subs run by small operators, and systems serving 20,000 or fewer subs run by all but the top two MSOs. But ACA says midsized operators -- with 2 million or fewer subs -- are "not more able to insure compliance" than those smaller operators. ACA said that as with the smaller operators, the midsized operators do not manufacture and/or develop software and are also dependent on whether vendors make products available in time. "[I]t is unfair to hold these mid-sized operators to the same timetable as larger operators that have the means to manufacture hardware and develop software solutions for their systems in the normal course of business," said ACA.