FCC: NAB CVAA Waiver Still Pending

The Federal Communications Commission has yet to rule on the National Association of Broadcasters request that the FCC give broadcasters more time to comply with a Communications and Video Accessibility Act (CVAA) requirement to convert emergency alert text in now-news programming accessible to the sight-impaired. An FCC spokesperson confirmed May 21 that decision is still pending. Broadcasters have a May 26 deadline to provide aural representations of visual emergency information -- crawls, radar images -- on a second audio stream.

NAB, joined by broadcast engineers, told the FCC broadcasters can't meet that deadline. NAB has asked the FCC for a temporary exemption until November, because it says the software needed to aurally transcribe crawls has not been supplied yet by vendors in some cases; also, they say, more time is needed for testing and shipping. The NAB also wants more time to translate graphics into speech because radar maps and other moving graphic images do not contain text files that can be converted. In other words, “The ability to comply with the requirement,” the association says, “does not exist now.”