FCC Seeks to Improve TV Accessibility 

"Five wins and a very light power reese know" sounds more like gibberish than a weather forecast.

But that was the closed caption that hearing-impaired people got during a report from the Weather Channel last month. What the caption was supposed to say was, "high winds and a very light, powdery snow."

Closed captioning is designed to help those who are deaf and hearing-impaired enjoy television and receive important news and weather reports. Unfortunately, captions are often riddled with typos and incomplete sentences that leave viewers struggling to make sense of what is being said.

"It's frustrating," said Cheryl Simpson, a Bay City resident who has hearing loss and often has to rely on her husband to tell her what's happening on the screen.

During emergency news alerts, she said, "The stuff you see on the crawl does not match what they are saying."

Late last week, the Federal Communications Commission chairman issued new rules that the regulatory agency hopes will improve closed captioning. "Something needs to be done," said Tom Wheeler, FCC Chairman. "The FCC will require that captions match spoken words in dialogue and convey background noises and other sounds to the fullest extent possible."

The order will also mandate that captions not block other content on the screen, overlap one another, run off the edge of the video screen or be blocked by other information. The bar will be slightly lower for news, sports, and other programming that airs live as opposed to entertainment programming that is completed weeks before airing.

However, the agency still wants improvement on the often sloppy captioning that accompanies live programming.

At the FCC meeting, Claude Stout, executive director of Telecommunications for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing, stressed the need for better captioning of news programming.

"One of the most frightening moments for my wife and I was the sniper shootings that took place in late 2002," Stout said, using sign language. "Local stations in my area showed breaking news on the latest developments, but they were not captioned. We felt trapped and helpless."

The first TV programming ever to feature captioning was the PBS cooking show "The French Chef" with Julia Child in 1972. But closed captioning didn't become commonplace until the 1990s. And even when it became a requirement in 1996, the FCC didn't foresee the need for any sort of quality control requirements for the industry.

"The lack of consistency in the quality of TV captioning demonstrates the original assumptions that the marketplace would ensure quality captions have not borne out," said Wheeler.

Wheeler not only expressed frustration about the current state of closed captioning, but he also wasn't happy with how long it took the agency to act on concerns about it. The FCC was first asked to address the state of closed captioning a decade ago and issued a notice of proposed rules to try to improve the situation in 2005. The matter has pretty much been in limbo until Wheeler, who was sworn in as chairman last November, made it a priority.

"Ten years is too slow a pace," Wheeler said at the meeting, and then signed, "This is only the beginning."