National Association of the Deaf

On Friday, October 2, 1998, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) released new captioning rules, granting many requests made in a petition filed by the NAD nearly a year ago, on October 15, 1997. The petition by the NAD prevailed over stiff opposition from the broadcast and cable television industry.

These new rules now require 100% of new, non-exempt programming to be captioned within eight years, and require real-time captioning for many local news programs. The new rules also create mandates for captioning on Spanish language programming and revise slightly rules governing older programs and movies (pre-1998).

"The revisions to the original captioning order are needed to ensure full access to television programs for all deaf and hard of hearing persons," said Karen Peltz Strauss, NAD's legal counsel for telecommunications policy*. "We are extremely pleased to see that the FCC is truly committed to ensuring such access."

In August of 1997, the FCC set up an eight year transition schedule for network captioning. At that time, the FCC required only 95% of new programming to be captioned at the completion of those eight years. The FCC justified the 5% exemption by claiming that unexpected difficulties could prevent a program from being captioned at the last minute.

The NAD argued that a 5% exemption is too great because it could mean excluding as much as one hour of programming a day.

The FCC has now determined that full accessibility -- as specified in the Telecommunications Act of 1996 -- requires that 100% of non-exempt programs be captioned.

The original FCC rules also allowed networks to use electronic newsroom captioning (ENR) for live news programs. ENR captions what is already entered into news TelePrompTers. The NAD argued that ENR does not provide full access because it does not caption live interviews, field reports, sports and weather updates, school closings, and other late breaking stories which are not pre-scripted.

The FCC's decision to require real time captioning for news programs on major stations is significant because it recognizes the importance of access to news programming.

The FCC will also be revising its rules to require that at least 30% of a channel's pre-rule programming have captions beginning on January 1, 2003. Pre-rule programming is anything that was published or shown prior to January 1, 1998, when the FCC rules first took effect.

The new rules also granted the NAD's request for Spanish language captioning. New programs will have a 12 year transition schedule and all pre-rule Spanish language programming will have to be captioned over a 14 year period.

The FCC is also examining how to best require captioning access to emergency news programming. It is expected than an Order on this matter will be released in the next few months.