FCC’s Genachowski Seeks ‘Spirit of Consensus’ on New Video Accessibility Committee

Industry executives and disability rights advocates should continue to strive toward consensus, as they begin work on recommending implementation of legislation signed into law last fall that updates the Communications Act to make new technologies accessible, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski said Thursday. “A spirit of consensus and partnership among the disabilities community and the industry” preceded passage of the 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act, he said. “The law is not something that was done to industry, it was done as something with industry,” he told the first meeting of the Video Programming Accessibility Advisory Committee.

The committee is charged with recommending how to deal with putting closed-captioned TV programming online with those descriptions, making programming guides and menus accessible and having compatibility between Internet Protocol-delivered video and various devices that get such programming. Devices for purposes of the disability act are those “designed to receive or play back video programming transmitted simultaneously with sound,” a slide shown to the committee said. The products must be U.S.-made or imported for use in the country. The legislation is at http://xrl.us/bieqgv.

FCC implementation of the law is not without hurdles, Genachowski and other commission officials said. The “challenge for us at the commission, a challenge for the disabilities community, too” is to quickly implement the law in a consensus-guided manner, Genachowski told several dozen panel members gathered at the agency: “No one wants to get caught up in squabbles.” There’s also “an interesting challenge that is created by newer technologies,” so people with disabilities can use all their features, he said. Genachowski said he hopes to “honor” the recommendations for FCC implementation that will be forthcoming from the committee, which began coordinating in four work groups toward that end.

Older remote controls were easier for the disabled to use than devices with touch screens, Genachowski said by way of example. “We have to make sure that in a touch-screen world,” the disabled can use that technology, he said. “It allows us to engage earlier in the development, production cycle, to accomplish more for people with disabilities with less cost.”

The panel has a “wonderful balance” of interests, said Deputy Chief Karen Peltz Strauss of the Consumer & Governmental Affairs Bureau, who was helping to run Thursday’s session. Participating are “some of the larger companies, some of the smaller companies, as well as national associations,” she said. Executives from Adobe, EchoStar, Motorola Mobility, NAB, the National Captioning Institute and Google and its YouTube video-sharing website attended the meeting.

A “limiting factor in this committee” is that “something has to be done if achievable,” with a four-prong test to determine whether that’s the case, Strauss said. “Reasonable effort or expense” is defined by the 2010 act to relate to the impact on a manufacturer or service provider of any rules, she said. Applying the law to title II of the Communications Act “may take some creativity,” because some parts of the draft were written with Title I in mind, Strauss said. Recommendations should “incorporate standards, protocols and procedures that have been adopted by ‘recognized industry standard-setting organizations’ where possible,” a slide she presented at the meeting said. “Consumer-generated programming is exempt.”