In case you haven't seen this.
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From: Kelly Gasque via announce [mailto:announce@xxxxxxxxxxxx] ;
Sent: Thursday, November 24, 2016 9:35 AM
To: leadership@xxxxxxxxxxxx; announce@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Cc: Kelly Gasque
Subject: [announce] ACB quoted in New Yorker article
WHY BLIND AMERICANS ARE WORRIED ABOUT TRUMP'S TECH POLICY
Article Link:
http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/why-blind-americans-are-worried-about
-trumps-tech-policy
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Every month, the Federal Communications Commission holds an open meeting, a
public event at which the agency's five commissioners vote on whether to
adopt new regulations and act on particular agenda items. The meetings
typically fill their scheduled two-hour time slots, but the most recent one,
which took place on November 17th, lasted all of nine minutes. (Commissioner
Mignon Clyburn spent several of those minutes thanking the fall interns and
tearfully eulogizing the journalist Gwen
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0OTkxMDRkMzQ4MTVlMTIzZmNhNTE0XCJdfSJ9> Ifill.) In the press conference that
immediately followed, Tom
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kZTY3NDc5MTAwMjhmOTM5YlwiXX0ifQ> Wheeler, the Democratic chairman of the
F.C.C., explained the reason for the curtailed agenda: congressional
Republicans, led by Senator Jim Thune, had asked him and his colleagues to
shelve anything "complex, partisan, or otherwise controversial" until after
Donald Trump's inauguration as President in January. Such requests,
according to Amina Fazlullah, the director of policy at the Benton
Foundation, a public-interest nonprofit, are "one hundred per cent normal."
She noted that, in late 2008, Democratic leaders demanded the same of George
W. Bush's F.C.C. head. "It doesn't make a ton of sense to work on an item
that you know the incoming Administration will then work to undo," Fazlullah
told me.
The F.C.C.'s self-imposed hiatus means that a number of high-profile
regulations are unlikely to be acted upon until Trump takes office, if ever.
These include a proposal to make cable companies offer alternatives to the
set-top box, which many Americans pay hundreds of dollars every year to
lease; expanding subsidized mobile broadband Internet in rural and tribal
areas; and capping prices on the kinds of large data networks that serve
hospitals, libraries, and schools-all of which largely benefit consumers at
the expense of telecommunications providers. It's also possible that the
F.C.C. under Trump will roll back some of its predecessor's rules, most
notably on net
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icm9hZGJhbmQtY2hlYXBlclwiLFwiaWRcIjpcIjAxODlkYjE1MjJlOTQ2MDVhZTAyNmVmMzlkNjV
iNGNiXCIsXCJ1cmxfaWRzXCI6W1wiNzkxMThjMzU0N2VhOWI5NjA3NWMzNDc1ZjZiMTFhZTUzZTA
0Y2RhMFwiXX0ifQ> neutrality. Fazlullah pointed out that the
President-elect's transition team has given very little indication of its
position on these issues, making informed speculation an impossibility.
Jeffrey Eisenach, a former Verizon consultant and current visiting scholar
at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, is reportedly
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advisingTrump on technology policy. He declined my request for comment.
But, while net-neutrality and consumer-rights advocates are already girding
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RcIjpcIjAxODlkYjE1MjJlOTQ2MDVhZTAyNmVmMzlkNjViNGNiXCIsXCJ1cmxfaWRzXCI6W1wiZG
EyY2M5ZmZjOGY5OTY4NmIzZGY1MmE3NzI5Zjc3M2NhYjY5ZTFmMlwiXX0ifQ> themselves for
a fight, a much less controversial issue is falling through the cracks. At
the bottom of the deleted
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JsX2lkc1wiOltcIjUyNzVmOGI0ZjQ4YTI1M2RmMmQyZjc3MGM4OTA2YWFkODAzNWEyNjRcIl19In
0> agenda for Thursday's F.C.C. meeting was an item titled "Video
Description: Implementation of the Twenty-First Century Communications and
Video Accessibility Act of 2010."
Video description is exactly what it sounds like: a narrator explains, for
the benefit of the blind or visually impaired, what's happening onscreen
during a TV show or movie, squeezing his or her voice-over into the gaps
between dialogue. The feature became available on television in the late
nineteen-eighties, although it was first proposed in 1974, and provided
informally by friends and family for decades before that. Marco
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2YTc5M2FkNjFiZjdiMDY3M2JjYjQwYjcwXCJdfSJ9> Salsiccia, a former animation and
visual-effects artist in the film industry who lost his eyesight completely
two years ago, said that the technology has limitations. "You miss a lot of
visual gags, and there's only so much they can fit in," he said. "Like 'The
Wolf of Wall Street'-that's a Scorsese film, so there's nothing but
dialogue, and there's no time to describe anything." But, even though
hearing video description is not the same as watching something with your
own eyes, he added, "at least it opens the door for you to participate."
Eric Bridges, the executive director of the American Council of the Blind,
who has been blind since birth, told me that before video description he
used to make up his own plotlines in order to avoid bothering sighted people
with questions.
The problem, however, is that not many shows have video description.
Currently, F.C.C. regulations require the four broadcast networks (ABC, CBS,
Fox, and NBC) to provide just four hours of the service per week, for
primetime or children's programming. Five cable channels (USA, TNT, TBS,
History, and Disney) are subject to the same requirement. "It's not a lot,"
Salsiccia said. "Thankfully, I was able to watch all of 'Breaking Bad'
before I lost my vision. But 'The Walking Dead' and 'Game of
Thrones'-everyone's talking about them, and I have to sit back and say,
O.K., I can't really watch that because I don't know what's happening." The
last deleted agenda item from last Thursday's open meeting would have
expanded the F.C.C.'s requirement by more than half, up to nearly seven
hours per week, and applied it to the top ten non-broadcast channels,
including premium ones such as HBO and AMC.
The proposal was an extension of an existing statute, the Twenty-first
Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act of 2010, and expanding
accessibility is, usually, a bipartisan issue. "To see that all our progress
could be stopped so fast by this election-it's really spooked people," Mark
Richert, the director of public policy at the American Foundation for the
Blind, told me. Fazlullah agreed. "I think for most of the advocacy field,
it's a little bit baffling to see this particular item get pulled off," she
said. Unlike some of the F.C.C.'s other initiatives, which critics oppose as
being too expensive and cumbersome, video description is relatively cheap to
implement. The agency estimates that the one-time cost to have an hour of
programming described ranges from twenty-five hundred to forty-one hundred
dollars-between 0.08 and 0.2 per cent of the over-all production costs of
one episode of an hour-long TV drama.
Bridges acknowledged that, in the grand scheme of post-election policy
debates, the question of whether to provide better TV programming for the
blind might not seem critical, at least to the sighted community. "We often
talk about accessible technology for employment and for education, and
that's really important," he said. "But, when we go home, we've never really
had meaningful access to the leisure and entertainment provided by
television." Blind and visually impaired people are not only missing out on
escapist amusements, he explained; they're also being cut off from an
important aspect of American social and cultural life. "As a blind father of
a sighted child, I can tell you that it is wonderfully enjoyable to be able
to watch a show with him and understand why he's laughing," Bridges said.
Getting the F.C.C. to mandate even today's paltry amount of video
description took more than two decades. "It was the very first thing I was
asked to do when I started interning at the American Foundation for the
Blind, in 1994," Richert said. The current requirement was suggested in 1999
and adopted in 2000, only to be blocked, in 2002, by the United States Court
of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, which agreed with entertainment-industry
lawyers that the F.C.C. lacked the authority to impose such a rule. It took
Congress another eight years to explicitly vest the agency with that
authority. "So, on Thursday, after all these years of down-in-the-weeds,
incredibly aggravating history, you had this proposal that has been
negotiated for months, that is literally printed and ready to be voted on,"
Richert said. "To have it be pulled at the last minute is deeply
frustrating." Given Trump's behavior and rhetoric on the campaign trail,
Salsiccia told me-in particular, his mocking
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impression of a disabled journalist-"a strong fear of regression on
accessibility issues is setting in."
On Monday, Richert and Bridges were among a handful of advocates who met
with each of the five commissioners' offices, urging them to vote on the
video-description expansion at their next meeting, on December 15th.
Afterward, I asked both men whether they thought the regulation might yet be
passed. "The short answer is, no one knows," Bridges said. The long answer,
Richert said, is that their conversations with staffers were polite but
inconclusive. "We heard a lot of 'I don't have anything to offer you today
in terms of anything substantive that we do or do not support in these
rules, and I don't have anything to offer you about the future timeline for
when the rules may or may not move forward,' " he said. "So that summarizes
that." Last Wednesday, before the open meeting, Thune told
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reporters that the commissioners' decision to scuttle their entire agendawas an overreaction, implying that a vote on video description would have
