A new bill has been introduced into congress that would target accessibility of web video. The "21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act of 2008" (
) covers about a dozen areas. The proposed law has Internet video captioning requirements.
Eighteen months after its enactment, the Federal Communications Commission must set up regulations and deadlines for "an appropriate schedule of deadlines for the provision of closed captioning of video programming distributed to the public over the Internet."
Three kinds of video would be affected:
- Material that has already been captioned for TV viewing
- Live programming
- Video that is "generally considered to be comparable to programming provided by multichannel programming distributors."
It is point three that is sticky. A whole lot of podcasts fall into this category. Closed captioning and transcriptions cost.... many podcasters see little if any profit from their shows. Always nice when congress sticks its nose in the Internet.
How about instead of sending money to worhless causes... they actualy fund this requirement.
How about instead of sending money to worhless causes... they actualy fund this requirement.
2 comments:
Accessibility is a big issue and a good portion of the population would benefit from this. Leaving out swaths of people isn't exactly smart buisness but past efforts haven't been effective (Section 508and Section 255 - consider them the carrot-and-stick)...
With regard to the language and where podcasters fit in, that comes down to agendy regulation. And how the FCC wants to look at this.
And in fact the Access Board's Advisory committee (which included, govt, advocates and industry) on this issue just finished putting together a preliminary report addressing this where they are also looking at similar changes.
Best,
Day
www.DayInWashington.com
Whew. Obviously, it has been a long day. Please pardon any spelling errors in the above post. My apologies.
Best,
Day
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