video accessibility face in accessing and viewing online closed captioning. One is the lack of consistently high-quality captions, which can vary greatly depending on where the captioning is coming from, he said. Another challenge: closed captioning workflows in existence today are still very much tied to broadcast television, he said, making the appearance of closed captions appear less than ideal on a computer or mobile device. Technology companies are offering some suggestions. Google has created a live captioning tool that allows a viewer to see captioning in real time. “It is no replacement for human-generated captions but it gives someone the ability to experience what is happening in real time so they can access the communication,” said KR Liu, head of brand accessibility at Google. The company also has created tools within YouTube that allow a video creator to integrate captioning directly into their content. “More and more, that is becoming a standard and important practice—that we educate our creators on incorporating [captioning],” she said. “We are seeing captioning being ‘burned in’ to make sure that [these] captions cannot be turned on and off. There are ways that we can come together and utilize each other’s technologies and platforms to better provide access for everyone.” For Daniel Kocmarek, general manager of global video supply chain and content operations for Prime Video, the most important first step is to decide that accessibility is a priority for an organization. For example, license agreements between Prime Video and third-party content providers require that the third parties deliver closed captions in the original voice language of the content.
CUSTOMIZED CAPTIONING Members of the panel also discussed how to ensure that captions on streaming videos can be customized based on the device being used. Step one: ensure that caption settings are easy to find. Step two: provide a way for viewers to customize how captions look. Step three: advocate and adopt standard file formats. “[We] want to contribute to industry-standard documentation and content that would help engineers navigate scenarios during development and testing,” Kocmarek said. For Dr. Vogler, the time has also come to establish a common testing protocol in order to verify that captions are in compliance. “I would encourage anyone and everyone to be part of implementing something like that so we can see such a reality,” he said. And what about the best solution for creat-
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Zainab Alkebsi (L), policy counsel with the National Association of the Deaf and Jim Denney, executive vice president and chief product officer at NBCUniversal
ing captions in the first place? “There is, of course, the human creation of closed captioning, but in terms of scale I think the most promising scale is ASR,” or automated speech recognition, said Jim Denney, executive vice president and chief product officer at NBCUniversal. ASR can be an effective tool to create captions that do not already exist and the technology has the benefit of aligning with other applications in the industry. “I think that ASR is one of our most promising tools in getting closed captioning into short-form clips,” he said. And what about that vast, uncaptioned landscape of consumer-generated videos? What tools might be developed to caption those videos? Some platforms already do an excellent job at generating closed captioning, Dr. Vogler said, pointing to YouTube and the platform’s support for generating closed captioning. “YouTube is a quintessential example of making it easy to make closed captioning for user-generated content,” he said. “TikTok does a similar thing in terms of making it easy for users to generate the caption of their own content.” Unfortunately, however, there is no standardization as of yet, he added. What the industry needs is two-fold, he said. One, support for ASR captioning and the ability to modify and improve auto-generated captioning online. And two, editing tools that can support closed captioning implementations. “Often consumers have to either do a search for a third-party tool in order to add captions to that video, or pay for an expensive upgrade to get access to that,” Dr. Vogler said. Captioning also needs to be encouraged to be a part of the creative process, said Google’s Liu. “The more that we can help creators… [provide] captioning to their content, the more that is visible, the more we can encourage
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other platforms to provide those tools to help make captioning available for creators—that is what is important here,” she said. “Captioning very much is a part of communication and connecting with people. Allowing people to experience that content is really important.”
THE REGULATORY VIEW The FCC’S role in regulating the marketplace was the focus of the second panel discussion. According to Blake Reid, professor at the Technology Law & Policy Clinic at the University of Colorado Law School, the captioning requirements for media that the CVAA set up in 2010 look nothing like the media marketplace of today. “We live in this world where the FCC’s captioning rules are divided between the legacy media… and a separate set of rules for programming that is delivered via internet protocol that has been on one of those legacy media channels,” he said. “We don’t live in that world anymore—we now live in a world where legacy TV and internet-delivered video have converged. From the perspective of consumers, they are now one in the same.” It’s time for the commission to recognize the reality that consumers and the industry already see—that online video distribution services are “television” and that it is time to extend the mandate for closed captions to online video as well, he said. Others said that the commission needs more statutory authority from Congress before it can contemplate requiring online-only programmers to caption online videos. “I know there is a lot of captioning going on in that area voluntarily, or in response to market forces or legal cases, but as far as the FCC being able to require it, it doesn’t seem like they have plain and clear authority under the framework right now,” said Larry Walke,