Consumer Advocates and Researchers File Petition for Rulemaking with the FCC – Disability and Rehabilitation Research Project on Twenty-First Century Captioning Technology, Metrics and Usability

Players have escaped from sprinkler quickly when they get blasted by sprinkler at Wimbledon. The caption reads "MAYBE THEY JUST NEEDED TIME TO DOUBLES MATCH AND WENT OFF" — Confused by this caption above? You’re not alone. Here is what the audio really said: “And, you know, maybe they just needed some time to cool off a bit, but they probably didn’t wanna be blasted with sprinklers like this. A mixed-doubles match at Wimbledon was interrupted when a sprinkler just went off,”

A coalition of consumer advocates, researchers and the Twenty-First Century Captioning Technology, Metrics and Usability project have filed a petition for rule making with the Federal Communications Commission. Our goal is improving live caption quality.

In 2014 the FCC issued an order about best practices for caption quality. Unfortunately, live captions still have many problems.

We ask the FCC to do these things:

Start a Notice of Inquiry into caption quality metrics
Provide guidance about using Automatic Speech Recognition

We look forward to working with all stakeholders on practical consumer-focused caption quality metrics. We also look forward to our research informing the FCC proceedings.

You can read the whole petition here.

Elsewhere on the Web:

The National Association of the Deaf has posted an ASL vlog on this topic.
Action Alert by the Hearing Loss Association of America