Local television news station compliance with online captioning rules
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Local television news station compliance with online captioning rules Norman E. Youngblood1 · Lakshmi N. Tirumala2 Accepted: 17 November 2020 © Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract In 2010, the United States’ Twenty-First Century Communication and Video Accessibility Act (CVAA) required local television broadcasters provide captions when they re-distributed their news broadcasts online if the material had been broadcast with captions. Concerned that broadcasters were trying to skirt the CVAA by breaking up the online version of their newscasts into individual clips, in 2014, the Federal Communication Commission (FCC) mandated broadcasters caption online news clips as well, effective January 2016. Research conducted shortly before the rules announcement found many stations illprepared for the new mandate. In the current study, we examined a stratified sample of 20% of US television station markets to see how well local news stations responded to the new captioning mandate and to see whether or not the burden of captioning newsclips may have led to a reduction in the number of stations putting newsclips online, a concern expressed at the time by then FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai. We found that while the captioning rate has improved substantially since studies conducted shortly before the law was announced, around 30% of the news clips we examined were uncaptioned. We did not find a reduction in the number of stations with video clips. All of the 156 sampled station web sites included video clips. Keywords FCC · Accessibility · Disability · Captions · CVAA
1 Introduction In July 2014, the United States’ Federal Communication Commission [1] announced new rules for captioning online television news clips. The new rules mandated that, as of January 1, 2016, when local television stations posted clips from their newscasts online, the clips must be captioned if they were captioned when broadcast. This change was a departure from the 2 1st Century Communication and Video Accessibility Act (CVAA) [2], signed into law in 2010, which applied the online captioning requirement to entire newscasts rather than individual clips. FCC members supporting the new rule argued that stations might choose to post individual stories in order to get around the rules, and studies by Youngblood and Lysaght [3] and the Media Insight Project [4] found that many stations were not captioning individual news stories when posted online. The FCC was not unanimous in its decision to change the captioning rules. Then-FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai (now * Norman E. Youngblood [email protected] 1
Auburn University, Alabama, USA
Drake University, Des Moines, Iowa, USA
2
FCC Chairman) argued that requiring local stations to caption individual news stories when they put the stories online would not have the intended effect of making news more available to users who rely on captions. He suggested instead, that the new captioning requirement might well discourage local stations, particularly those in small m
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