Understanding US Federal Laws on Captioning: ADA, CDAA, and Rehabilitation Act
Explore key US federal laws impacting captioning: Rehabilitation Act, ADA, and CDAA. Learn about their requirements and recent updates for accessibility.
File
US Laws Requirements for Captioning Online Video
Added on 10/01/2024
Speakers
add Add new speaker

Speaker 1: A little bit about the applicable accessibility laws. So in the US, there are three federal laws that are applicable to captioning. The first one is the Rehabilitation Act, which was originally enacted in 1973. So the two sections there that impact captions are sections 508 and 504. Section 508 is a fairly broad law that requires federal communications and information technology to be accessible for employees and the public. And for video, of course, this means having closed captions. For audio only, transcripts are sufficient. Section 504 is very similar, but it sort of has a different angle in that it's more of an anti-discrimination law that just requires equal access for disabled people with respect to electronic communications. And both of these laws apply to all governmental agencies and certain public colleges and universities that receive federal funding, such as through the Assistive Technology Act. The second federal law that impacts captioning is the ADA. That's the Americans with Disabilities Act, enacted in 1990. And so the ADA actually has five parts to it. The two that impact captioning are Title II and Title III. So Title II is for public entities, and Title III is for commercial entities. And the one that has had the most activity recently is Title III. And so that's the one for commercial entities. And the bar there with Title III is that in order to qualify for that, you have to be considered a place of public accommodation. And historically, the ADA has really been applied more toward physical structures, such as requiring a ramp for wheelchair access to a building. It has never been applied to online businesses. But one of the landmark lawsuits that happened a couple of years ago was with the NAD. That's the National Association of the Deaf, sued Netflix on the grounds that a lot of their movies, their streaming movies, lacked captions, and they cited the ADA Title III. One of Netflix's arguments was that they do not qualify as a place of public accommodation. And the courts ended up ruling in the end that Netflix does qualify as a place of public accommodation. They end up settling, and Netflix has captioned, I think, close to 100% if not 100% of all of their content at this point. But the interesting thing that came out of that case is that if Netflix is considered a place of public accommodation, that sets a very profound precedent. That means that there are many other types of organizations out there that would also potentially qualify as places of public accommodation. Certainly private colleges and universities potentially would be covered by the ADA as well. The last and most recent federal law is the CDAA, which is the 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act. That was enacted in 2010. And that law requires captioning for online video that also aired, that was broadcast on television with captions. So again, this is something that only strictly applies to content that aired on television as well. And the most recent update with the CDAA is that about a month ago, in July of this year, the FCC ruled that video clips are also covered by the CDAA. So if you publish, for example, a two-minute video clip that's part of a 30-minute TV show, then you have to add captions to that by law. Also earlier in the year, in February of this year, the FCC published some rules around captioning quality. In the past, this was sort of a gray area about how good do captions really need to be. But FCC sort of quantified a lot of that and really just sort of standardized the requirements for captioning quality. And that rule was broken up into four parts. So one is captioning accuracy, that the accuracy really needs to be pretty much flawless, at least 99% accurate. It provided some leniency for live captioning, which is understandable. But for post-production captioning, they pretty much said the accuracy needs to be flawless. Second part of it was synchronization. Captions really need to be pretty much perfectly aligned with the audio track. And when captions lag or drift, they said that that was unacceptable. The third part is program completeness. There were a lot of complaints previously about sometimes captions would end before the show actually ends. Sometimes there'd be a scene after the credits, which did not include captioning. So the FCC ruled that captions need to cover the entire program from start to finish. And then the last part of it is on-screen caption placement. And this refers to the position of the captions on the screen. Captions are typically placed in the lower bottom third. And that works well, but sometimes that obstructs other text. And so the requirement now is that if captions obstruct something critical on the screen, then they need to be relocated to a different part of the screen. And so we actually have a patent-pending process that we use for this, where we actually go through and we look at the pixels on each frame. And if we notice that the captions are obstructing critical text, then we'll automatically reposition the captions. And that's something that's done automatically.

ai AI Insights
Summary

Generate a brief summary highlighting the main points of the transcript.

Generate
Title

Generate a concise and relevant title for the transcript based on the main themes and content discussed.

Generate
Keywords

Identify and highlight the key words or phrases most relevant to the content of the transcript.

Generate
Enter your query
Sentiments

Analyze the emotional tone of the transcript to determine whether the sentiment is positive, negative, or neutral.

Generate
Quizzes

Create interactive quizzes based on the content of the transcript to test comprehension or engage users.

Generate
{{ secondsToHumanTime(time) }}
Back
Forward
{{ Math.round(speed * 100) / 100 }}x
{{ secondsToHumanTime(duration) }}
close
New speaker
Add speaker
close
Edit speaker
Save changes
close
Share Transcript