Coming Soon to a Living Room Near You: Video Description

Posted on 8/25/2011 at 4:43 PM
by Mark Richert

Big news for all the TV lovers out there: the FCC just took a decisive step toward ensuring more video described programming is available to people with vision loss. This week, the FCC voted unanimously (4-0) to require leading broadcast and cable channels to offer at least 50 hours of described programming every calendar quarter. This will allow those of us who are blind or visually impaired to keep up with news and pop culture and more fully participate in society. When the new rules kick in July 1, 2012, video description will begin to take its rightful place along side closed captioning as a useful and popular means for enjoying TV.

And just like captioning, we can expect that a service first deployed for people with disabilities will grow into a medium with much wider appeal.

For more information, visit: http://www.coataccess.org/node/10045

Topic:: Public Policy

There are currently 4 comments

Re: Coming Soon to a Living Room Near You: Video Description

Posted by airlines on 8/31/2011 at 9:02 PM

Broadcast these programs very useful, I hope it will be maintained!

Re: Coming Soon to a Living Room Near You: Video Description

Posted by airlines on 8/31/2011 at 9:04 PM

And it certainly will be the blind community care

Re: Coming Soon to a Living Room Near You: Video Description

Posted by 510699 on 9/1/2011 at 4:22 AM

let's hope that this time the TV programmers will do a better job letting us know which shows are described than they did in 2002 when we had rules before

Re: Coming Soon to a Living Room Near You: Video Description

Posted by NHLONG on 9/4/2011 at 10:04 PM

This is good theory