FCC Grants NAB, ACA Emergency Info Waiver Requests

With the deadline hard approaching at the end of the day May 26, the Federal Communications Commission has granted various waiver requests from the National Association of Broadcasters and American Cable Association from the FCC's implementation of rules requiring emergency information provided visually during non-newscast programming be accessible audibly to the sight-impaired via a secondary audio channel. Broadcasters got an extra six months of the May 26 compliance deadline, and a carve-out from the requirement for audio descriptions of maps and other non-textual graphics, but only for 18 months. The FCC also granted NAB's request that it not have to include audio descriptions of running school closure textual crawls.

"The record created in response to the NAB Petition shows that the technical solutions necessary for broadcasters to aurally transcribe emergency information text crawls on the secondary audio stream were not developed and brought to market in time for broadcasters to test and implement these solutions by the current May 26, 2015 compliance deadline," the FCC's Media Bureau said in granting the extension of the deadline until Nov 30, 2015. “NAB is pleased with the six-month extension granted by the FCC," said association spokesman Dennis Wharton. "We worked closely with the visually impaired community to persuasively demonstrate that many stations would be unable to comply with the May start date due to technical reasons beyond broadcasters’ control. We look forward to complying with the new deadline by Nov 30.”