NNSquad - Network Neutrality Squad
[ NNSquad ] 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act
21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act http://bit.ly/dulpQG (Library of Congress) The 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act has been signed by President Obama. The legislation includes mandates for accessibility in smartphones and other devices, and includes the requirement that programming first broadcast on television include captioning when made available on the Web as well. My reading of the legislation is that this latter aspect applies only to major (that is over-the-air) broadcasters, and there are various exemptions also available. As such this seems a relatively modest requirement. Most commercial programming is already captioned, what the legislation appears to do is require that in most cases the effort be made to transfer those captions to the online versions (or that other captioning mechanisms be used online). An interesting question is if and how the availability of autocaptioning (e.g. as in YouTube) plays into this requirement. --Lauren-- NNSquad Moderator