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.
CACP and Wireless RERC comments highlighted the need for EAS nationwide testing to account for human ability factors, as well as technical considerations when setting a national standard for text crawls. Their comments advised that any standards should consider the needs of people with vision disabilities, as well as those that simultaneously experience vision and hearing loss; noting a correlation between visual acuity and caption reading ability.
Further comments and recommendations concerning non-English alerts, text crawl placement, audio accessibility, and text-to-speech were made as well. For more information, please click the link below.
