FCC Video Programming Accessibility Public Forum

Monday, March 28 | 1:00 – 3:45 pm ET
Watch the public forum.

The Federal Communications Committee’s (FCC’s) Media Bureau and Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau will co-host this second accessibility-related Forum focused on issues surrounding audio description.

Consumers currently watch a large volume of video programming online, but the availability of audio description online is inconsistent, even for video programming for which an audio description track already exists. The Video Programming Accessibility Forum – Online Audio Description will explore the state of audio description availability for online video programming, including current best practices and technical issues to overcome. The Forum also will explore ways to enhance accessibility, such as voluntary actions to promote online audio description.

The Forum will include two panels that will feature speakers such as television, cable, and online video programming distributors, as well as consumer advocates. Please see the Public Notice for the full agenda.

This is a public event and will be streamed live on fcc.gov/live and the FCC’s YouTube channel. We encourage the public and interested stakeholders to engage in this discussion by sending questions during the event to livequestions@fcc.gov . Commission staff will enter information about the panel, including all relevant public notices, the agenda, and a link to a video recording of the event, into the public record for this proceeding.

The meeting will be webcast with open captioning and sign language interpreters at www.fcc.gov/live

** DAD Note: You may recall the recent Superbowl and other shows had captioning issues.  This meeting is a good opportunity to highlight that the ‘automatic’ voice/audio captioning (aka: ASR) is unreliable and that we should go back to the old way using CART (Communication Access Realtime Translation) which produced more accurate captioning.  Show producers wanted to save money and fought for ASR so this is your opportunity to highlight issues.  **