Broadcasters to FCC: Grant Retroactive Audible Crawl Waiver

The rule -- which requires that broadcasters provide an audio version of onscreen graphically displayed emergency information -- has been continuously waived for nearly a decade but was allowed for the first time to take effect last month. Gray Television said in comments posted Monday that this has caused the broadcaster to “cease providing radar maps and other visual, non-textual emergency information, due to concerns about potential Commission enforcement.” Said the Society of Broadcast Engineers (SBE), “There continues to be no viable technical solution to allow for automated creation and delivery of aural descriptions for visual non-textual emergency information.”

Gray Television said it “directed its stations to remove all maps and other nontextual information from its emergency crawls” after the most recent audible crawl waiver expired Nov. 15. This was the first time the agency has allowed the rule to expire without retroactively waiving it. NAB’s petition asked the FCC to grant an expedited, brief and retroactive extension of the waiver while the agency considers its separate request for a longer extension. The comment period for the longer extension closes Jan. 9. The American Council for the Blind has said it supports NAB’s request. The entire industry has “had to choose whether to continue to provide the on-screen graphics and incur the risk of sanctions, or eliminate regulatory risks by removing the potentially critical visual information from on-air emergency programming,” said a joint filing from Block Communications, Nexstar, CMG, Scripps and others.

Broadcasters need the waiver because it still isn’t technologically possible to abide by the current rules, said numerous commenters. The audible crawl rule requires an “aural representation” of the “visual emergency information,” SBE said. “Precise aural description of non-textual content (usually, e.g., a radar or graphic) containing emergency information is a very different matter than conveying emergency information that is equivalent to that depicted in the non-textual content.”

While broadcasters reporting on severe weather typically display a graphical weather map accompanied by a text crawl with roughly equivalent information, that doesn’t satisfy the rule’s requirements, SBE said. “The critical details of any emergency addressed by the crawl and the radar are the same -- generally, e.g., the type of emergency and the areas that will be affected thereby,” SBE said. “However, because the crawl does not precisely mirror and/or describe the graphical content of the radar map, stations have elected to remove such radar maps now that the waiver has expired.”

Removing the visual emergency information to comply with the rule “degrades service to viewers who can actually benefit from receiving that information, particularly in weather emergency situations, without improving service to the viewers who are unable to access it,” said the joint broadcaster filing. With winter approaching, stations won’t be able to sufficiently broadcast warnings about severe weather without a retroactive waiver, the joint filing said. Each day the rule “remains in effect without waiver risks diminution of visual coverage of emergency information that could otherwise benefit the public,” said ABC, CBS, NBCUniversal and Fox in a joint filing.