Funding Problems Hurt PEG Captioning
A lack of funding is a major barrier to public, education and government (PEG) channels providing closed captions, said consumer groups, FCC officials, and the PEG channel advocacy group Alliance for Community Media (ACM) during a roundtable discussion on PEG closed captioning at the FCC Tuesday. Though FCC rules and the Americans with Disabilities Act require captioning for PEG channels, both have exemptions for size and funding that most PEG channels fall under, several industry officials said. That hampers the ability of the hearing impaired to participate in their local communities, said Telecommunications for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing (TDI) Executive Director Claude Stout. “We're paying our taxes just like the rest of you,” Stout said. “How can I make an informed decision if I'm not informed?”
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The funding concerns for PEG channel funding are complicated, said ACM President Mike Wassenaar. Many such channels operate under funding restrictions that prevent them from turning a profit and limit how they can use their funding. That could make it difficult for some channels to absorb the additional cost of providing captions if requirements were to change, Wassenaar said. To increase the accessibility of their programming, PEG channels “need flexibility,” which could require changes to state and local laws, he said.
Money concerns also affect the captioning companies, said LNS Captioning President Carol Studenmund. She said programmers urge the companies to lower their rates and consumers push for higher quality captions, causing some companies to exit the industry. Although caption company representatives at the discussion listed many possible problems that can lead to garbled, out-of-synch, or misaligned captions, Gallaudet University Technology Access Program Director Christian Vogler said the reasons don't matter on the consumer end, where the “usability” of the captions is what's paramount.
Voice recognition technology probably won't provide a cheap captioning solution anytime soon, said Tole Khesin, vice president-marketing at caption company 3PlayMedia. The technology currently still requires human intervention to correct inevitable errors and “with speech recognition when it's wrong it's wrong spectacularly,” he said. Though the tech could make marginal improvements, it probably won't be usable for captioning without human intervention “in our lifetime,” he said.
Multichannel video programming distributors need to do a better job of including information about PEG channel programming in their guides, Stout said. The lack of clear information about upcoming PEG programming and whether it will include captions makes it difficult for the hearing impaired to include it in their schedules, he said. Asked by an audience member to commit NCTA to supporting more PEG information in programming guides, NCTA Deputy General Counsel Diane Burstein said the issue depended on the individual situations. There are “very unique things” about the way local PEG channel information is provided to carriers, she said. That makes it “very challenging” to include specific information in channel guides, she said.