Grant Laird, Jr. Blog

Email to FCC today…

Last 1-2 years, deaf community including myself struggled trying to understand how closed captioning will work and how it will affect with new HDTV format. As far as I know that FCC already made sure that all newer HDTV to offer "digital caption" which offers more variety like fonts, color, bold, background, etc. It is very exciting.

My family and friend have "living room" HDTV. I’ve been trying to help them how to turn digital caption on HDTV format television. Last Saturday, we finally figure it out how to turn it on by click MENU on Comcast digital box (Not on remote!!) but we still can’t figure out how to change font or color at this point.

The cable provider & TV Maker are usually clueless when it comes with HDTV caption even on www.DTV.gov website. Personally, I am planning to buy one myself but I want to buy right one at first time.

My questions:

1. When will they make it easier for deaf community to get help with digital captioning? 
2. Who is responsible to help them out? 
3. Where do I go and find more details about it? Not much of help at Google Search.
4. Not all HDTV model support it — where can I find out which model that do support it.

Hope you can guide me to get more information and get some help.

Many thanks!

Grant W. Laird, Jr.
http://blog.grantlairdjr.com

TV Captioning Part 2 – Act Now to Improve Captioning

By Cheryl Heppner, 10/24/05

Many people who were unable to attend NVRC’s 10/22/05 workshop on TV Captioning asked us to share the information. Part 1, which was sent on 10/23/05, gave a quick recap of the laws and regulations related to captioning on TV, followed by a list of challenges we face.

The second part of the workshop was about taking action. We now have an opportunity work to fix some of the problems with captioned TV. Let’s tackle them by sending comments to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC )about potential changes in the captioning regulations. You do not need to be deaf or hard of hearing to send comments. Poor caption quality affects everyone. Friends and family members also know how important high quality captions are to building reading skills and vocabulary, and how they enable us to enjoy television together instead of turning TV watching for education or entertainment into a frustrating experience. And sometimes, even without hearing loss, people depend on captions in noisy places or to watch TV when the kids are sleeping.

Read the rest of this entry »