It's a good website to check out. They tell you all of the problems associated with captioning and more. As I mentioned earlier today about captioning issues with HDTV and high-definition media/video players such as Blu-ray and HDTV receivers.
They will tell you what you need to know and have the sources to back it up. It is amazing how much power the corporations wield when it comes to passing accessibility laws. They always try to find a loophole to weasel their way out and make excuses. Corporations always send their lobbyists to the government buildings and put the pressure onto the politicians to make some changes. For example, before the digital TVs came out, the government only mandated that analog TVs with a screen size of 13 inches and above must be CC-ready.
Then they had to make a few things once they started selling HDTV displays. Today, the standards are still incredibly weak. We need to start mandating the media/video players including DVD players, Blu-ray players, HDTV receivers and more to be CC-ready. It shouldn't be just the TV sets anymore. Even portable DVD players with built-in LCD screens should be able to display CC.
It is sickening that many people are still living in blissful ignorance while we are fighting to break down the barriers. It is one of the reasons why it is so difficult to get what we want because not enough people are backing us up. Enough is enough. This needs to stop falling onto deaf ears. No pun intended.
Equal access for all.
iTheme Techno Blogger by Black Quanta. Theme & Icons by N.Design Studio. Distributed by eBlog Templates
4/13/2008 4:34 PM
Banjo,
I'm with you on this one. They need to step up and do something about this issue. They need to stop playing games with us. UGH!
Keep up good work, banjo! I've always enjoy your blogs.
Misha :D
4/13/2008 4:42 PM
Yup, We need to fight on our part to advocate it for the CC.. Since they try to find lot of loopholes to get away with it.. Make us fall thru the cracks.. Since we did win that part of cc built in tv's.. Now our next part of battles to do it with others.. As long we have equal access as much as they have..
Fight for our rights to have it!!
4/14/2008 5:46 AM
What I don't get is why the Openandclosed.org project has been so quiet? I haven't seen much of anything coming from it, or from Joe Clark,since it's founding.
Here is an update from his site:
http://joeclark.org/projects/
(incidently, Joe Clark is also the other of some works on the RHCP Red Head Cluster Phenomenon http://fawny.org/rhcp/)
That's not to say it's not happening, but somewhere, somehow, someone should be documenting it - noting the progress, success and failure of captioning.
I had written him back when I was looking for standards for which to provide the captioning for my movie trailer,et al captions.
To me, the Media Access Group http://main.wgbh.org/wgbh/pages/mag/ , http://ncam.wgbh.org/
still seems to be the standard bearer, doing the most practical work to provide, and advocate captioning.
Also, WebAim, http://www.webaim.org/intro in the internet Arena.
Keep Pushin'
4/15/2008 1:58 PM
Banjo, I do believe that part of the reason folks are failing to follow up on these things is that there is a depression going on in the United States and many people are struggling just with the bare necessities, gas, food, utilities, childcare, and they have no money left over for luxury items. For myself, while I can well afford all the things that you mention,*but* our "old stuff" still works and without any problems, so we have not added to our tech toys.
Your blog posts are wonderful and we learn so much from you, keep them coming!
Lantana
4/20/2008 12:32 PM
What I don't get is.... We all have the option of turning on CC or not to use it at all. Why is it such a problem to add that to all the devices?
4/21/2008 12:47 AM
Keep in mind that back when the original law mandating CC decoding in TVs larger than 13" was passed in the US, the chip to do the decoding was NOT a trivially-cheap component. In the case of 13" black & white TVs (which, if I recall correctly, cost something like $79 back in the early 80s), the CC hardware would have added $25 or more to the TV's retail cost.
As a practical matter, once the decoding chips became trivially cheap, they ended up in nearly all new TVs anyway, even those 13" or smaller. In the case of ATSC digital TVs, there's no excuse at all for not supporting captions, because all the hardware necessary to display them is part of the baseline capabilities of any new set that gets built today ANYWAY.
The lack of captioning in ONLINE videos is mainly the fault of MPEG-LA and (ironically) Sorenson (who developed h.263+ which is ~98% of what ultimately became a subset of MPEG-4). Everyone involved dragged their feet before finally nailing down the "official" way to embed caption data within the program stream. If there's no standard for embedding data in the MPEG stream, it's almost pointless for anyone else to bother trying to support captions, because they won't work reliably anyway.
People who bitch to the FCC are wasting their time. The FCC has zero jurisdiction over online videos. The RIGHT people to bitch at are Apple, Adobe, Ulead, Microsoft, Pegasus (makers of TMPGenc), Ahead (makers of Nero), and everyone else who publishes video-editing software. Until THEY reliably support caption-editing as a seamless part of the video encoding workflow, everything downstream will be randomly hit-or-miss (and mostly miss). Once the caption metadata is being encoded into program streams by most encoding apps, the problem will mostly be solved, because only the players will be left to worry about... and the end user can usually choose his player HIMSELF, so self-help options from that point are readily available to anyone who's not computer illiterate.
4/27/2008 4:23 PM
What a stupid thing to argue over. There is a program you can get for the computer that will provide closed captioning to any sounds. Look it up.
4/27/2008 6:54 PM
Anonymous, don't tell me to look it up. If you know what you are talking about, you should at least provide a link to back yourself up.
If not, you are just keeping your head buried in the sand and remain ignorant to everything in the world.
6/03/2008 11:09 PM
I'm not hard of hearing or deaf,my son & his signifigint other r.But,we've used cc for many years,even after my son grew up & went of to college & so on.What can be done to get these company's to make cc avaible on the newer tv's & movie's.Please post a blog.The only thing I can think of is a petition to circulate & get back to the bigt whigs in Wa.Thanx for reading.Concerned