The Other Side to Closed Captioning

Video description and closed captioning are two sides of the same coin: descriptions providing blind and visually impaired television viewers an audio narrator's depiction of the video portion of a television program, captions providing deaf and hard of hearing viewers video text of what's spoken in the audio portion of a program. But there's a wide gulf between the presence of the two services in television programming today. By 1989, virtually the entire primetime schedule on the major broadcast networks was captioned, and today much of cable network fare and local news programs provide captions. Captions are viewed not just by those with hearing problems, but by people in sports bars, fitness clubs and other areas where a noisy environment makes it impossible to hear a program's audio. In contrast, a relative handful of programs in the multi-hundred channel universe provide video description service, among them Fox's "The Simpsons," CBS's "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation," an impressive portion of PBS's schedule, and some programs and movies on cable networks, particularly Nickelodeon and Turner Classic Movies. The reasons for the disparity in availability between the two services fall into the regulatory, cost, and technical categories. In the mid-1990s, the FCC began preparing timelines and requirements for both closed captions and video description. They adopted regulatory requirements for both, but while the closed caption provisions got a relatively free ride, the television and motion picture industries fought requirements for video descriptions in court in 2002, claiming the commission did not have authority to issue such requirements. The industry won and those regulations were tossed out. That legal rampart to the commission's requirements may be breached in the near future, as Congressman Edward Markey (D-Mass.) has introduced H.R. 3101, the "Twenty-first Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act of 2009," which, if passed, provides the FCC the authority to issue video description requirements and instructs the commission to get after it.