Regulatory

September 2014 – The FCC released a  Public Notice [CG Docket No. 10-213] seeking comment on the Coalition of E-Reader Manufacturers’ petition for an extension of the FCC’s waiver of accessibility rules for basic e-readers, stating that “e-readers are single-purpose reading devices that consumers use for accessing text-based works (i.e., reading), not for other purposes, such as ACS.”

September 2014 – The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) issued a Public Notice to remind video programming distributors of their obligation to make emergency information accessible to persons who are deaf, hard of hearing, blind, or visually impaired in accordance with section 79.2 of the FCC’s [47 C.F.R.] regulations. The notice applies to “broadcasters, cable operators, satellite television services, and any other distributor of video programming” as specified by the code of federal regulations.

August 2014 – The Wireless RERC and Georgia Tech’s Center for Advanced Communications Policy (CACP) submitted comments to the FCC’s Notice of Proposed Rulemaking In the Matter of Review of the Emergency Alert System (EAS) [EB Docket No. 04-296]. As a result of the nationwide EAS test revealing issues with text crawls, the FCC requested public comments about the accessibility of EAS' visual and audio presentation of text.

August 2014 - The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) issued a press release August 8, 2014 establishing compliance deadlines for text-to-911 services. The adopted rules complement previous voluntary commitments made by the top four wireless carriers to support text-to-911 by May 2014. In addition to AT&T, Verizon, Sprint and T-mobile, certain IP-based text applications and the remaining wireless carriers are expected to support text-to-911 by the end of the year.

August 2014 – Anvato, provider of the leading video platform and multi-device player TV Everywhere, announced that their turnkey video software has reached full compliance with the FCC’s latest closed-captioning mandate. The FCC extended IP closed-captioning to “straight-lift” video clips, montages, and video clips of programming shown live and near-live on television in July. According to Anvato, they have met these requirements, as well as captioning compliance for back-catalog content less than a month after the ruling.