More About the Video Captioning Law

The House-passed version of the 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act has a provision that would give the FCC up to $10 million a year for its Telecommunications Relay Fund. The money would go toward specialized equipment that low-income deaf-blind Americans need to access the Internet. The bill's focus is ensuring closed-captioning for video on the Internet. The measure would establish an FCC advisory committee to examine closed captioning, video description; and access to emergency information, programming guides, menus and user interfaces. It will require most video devices to include the capacity for audio descriptions of video content and for closed captioning of audio content. Consumer-generated content would be exempted from the law while government-made video is already covered by a previous presidential order. The bill now goes to the Senate for consideration.