IP Captions Low Quality?

Report on IP Closed Captioning Finds Numerous Problems

May 17, 2013 by Monty Tayloe|Top News

The consumer groups said they tested a variety of online videos, full-length online TV shows and video clips using multiple Web browsers and different devices. The report said 10 percent of full-length video viewed for the study lacked captions, but that the numbers went up significantly for shorter chunks of online video. The FCC order said IP video clips aren’t required to be captioned, but longer video segments, or multiple segments that together constitute the bulk of a full-length program are required to have captions. The consumer groups said that telling the difference between a video clip and a segment was extremely difficult, but 76 percent of video segments they viewed were uncaptioned, including 70 percent of news segments and 93 percent of non-news segments. Video clips, not required to sport captions, lacked them 87 percent of the time, said the report. “This is a big issue,” said Associate Professor Christian Vogler of Gallaudet University and director of its Technology Access Program. “During the Boston bombing, there were lots of news clips out there and they weren’t accessible to us. We have limited access to news, because everything has gone video."

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Eight consumer groups representing the hearing impaired asked the FCC to fix the rules governing closed captions over Internet Protocol. That was as a study released Thursday by Telecommunications for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing and the other consumer groups that have complained about such issues in the past (CD April 19 p11) found “widespread lack of captioning,” caption quality problems, and a lack of identification for captioned video (http://bit.ly/10TqlT5). The groups submitted the report to the FCC as a supplement to their earlier petition seeking reconsideration of its IP closed captioning rules. Meanwhile there is an FNPRM on IP closed captioning on circulation. “As more and more Americans get their news and other information online in the form of video clips, deaf and hard of hearing people are being left behind despite Congress’ intent to make them accessible,” staff attorney Andrew Phillips of the National Association for the Deaf told us.

The report said that the problems go beyond caption availability. Where they did find captions, the consumer groups found numerous problems with quality, from illegibility to misspelling and timing mistakes. Nearly all of Univision’s online videos had captions that were “practically unreadable even to a fluent Spanish reader” and others flashed only one letter on the screen at a time, the report said. It said that many videos that had captions when viewed on a laptop, didn’t when viewed on a mobile device, and that many videos that are captioned aren’t identified as such. That means users must start watching the video, sit through an uncaptioned ad and wait for someone in a video to speak to discover if captions are present. “Requiring deaf and hard of hearing consumers to undertake these time-consuming steps simply to determine whether a program contains captions is inconsistent with the CVAA’s goal of equal access,” said the report.

The draft FNPRM proposes remedies to some of CEA’s issues with the IP captioning rules, including delays for requiring implementation of the rule for “removable media” devices like Blu-ray players and waivers for camcorders, said an FCC official. The association had filed a petition for reconsideration of the order. Media Bureau spokeswoman declined to comment on the FNPRM.

Larry Goldberg, a captioning expert who was part of the VPAAC group that made recommendations on FCC IP closed captioning policy, said the issue of captioning video clips was “extensively debated” during the lead-up to the commission’s current rules. Language in the CVAA makes changing it “problematic,” said Goldberg, director of public-TV station WGBH Boston’s National Center for Accessible Media. A TDI is optimistic that the problems the report identified will be fixed, said a spokesman. “We are pretty confident that the FCC will see our way on many items.”