Other News

December 6, 2012—The four largest wireless carriers in the U.S.—AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, and T-Mobile—have made the commitment to accelerate the deployment of text-to-911 services, starting with major deployments in 2013 and nationwide access available by May 15, 2014. The announcement was made by Julius Genachowski, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman, who also stated the FCC’s promise to work with all stakeholders and initiate any additional actions to ensure the accessibility of text-to-911 messaging is reached as soon as possible.

November 28, 2012—YouTube announced that automatic captioning will be available for YouTube videos in six languages: German, Italian, French, Portuguese, Russian, and Dutch. This is in addition to the closed captioning already provided for English, Japanese, Korean and Spanish videos. YouTube acknowledges that there will be some errors with automatic captioning but that there are tools the content creators can use to improve the quality of their captions.

October 31, 2012 —The United States Access Board has started an initiative to improve access to prescription drug labels, specifically for individuals who are blind, visually impaired or elderly, following the Food and Drug Administration Safety and Innovation Act (FDASIA) of 2012. A working group, including representatives from industry and various blind and elderly advocacy organizations, will evaluate alternatives such as the inclusion of braille on prescription labels, auditory technology to include “talking bottles”, and radio frequency identification tags.

October 9, 2012 — A consent decree was entered into by plaintiffs National Association of the Deaf (NAD), Western Massachusetts Association of the Deaf and Hearing Impaired, and Lee Nettles and the defendant Netflix, Inc. (Netflix). The Consent Decree [Case No.

September 25, 2012—The Consortium for Citizens with Disabilities, the Habilitation Benefits Coalition, the Coalition to Preserve Rehabilitation, and the Independence Through Enhancement of Medicare and Medicaid Coalition, released a technical assistance document that aims to be a resource for states in designing essential health benefits packages for “rehabilitative and habilitative services and devices,” as defined by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA).