Captioning

Telecommunications for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing (TDI) is seeking to hire for the position: Product Manager, Speech-to-Text Captioning Project. TDI is seeking a talented and versatile professional for the position of Product Manager for its soon-to-be developed, Speech-to-Text Captioning/Caption Correction, a two-year long grant project.  Responsibilities include: surveying, accessing, preparing forecasts and analyses, planning, introducing, and marketing/developing the new product while maintaining professional and technical knowledge.

March 2013 — In March, U.S. Senator Tom Harkins (D-Iowa) introduced two bills to Congress that would expand the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) to provide closed captioning on movies shown in movie theaters and on all airplanes. The purpose of the bills is to improve the accessibility of movies to individuals with disabilities. The Cinema Act [S.555.IS] would require that all movie theaters with two or more theaters or screening rooms showing copyrighted motion pictures provide captioning and video description.

December 2012 - At the end of December, several disability organizations, referred to collectively as the “Consumer Groups,” filed an informal complaint with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) alleging that Amazon.com, Inc. (Amazon) repeatedly violated the FCC Internet Protocol (IP) closed captioning rules, 47 C.F.R. § 79.4. Under the Twenty-First Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act (CVAA) enacted in 2010, television shows and videos available online are required to provide captions and increase accessibility for all individuals, including those with disabilities.

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.