Here is more info on the Audio Description ruling.

Pratik Patel
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> Court Says Broadcasters Don't Have to Offer Technology for Blind
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> November 9, 2002
> By THE NEW YORK TIMES
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> WASHINGTON, Nov. 8 - A federal appeals court today
> overturned Federal Communications Commission rules that
> would require broadcasters to adopt technology that would
> allow blind people to follow the action on television by
> listening to a narrator describe the physical movements.
>
> The court said Congress had not given the commission
> authority to order such video description when it asked the
> agency to study ways to accommodate blind and visually
> impaired people.
>
> The commission approved rules for video description in 2000
> as part of a broad plan to make telecommunications and
> technology, like wireless phones, more accessible to people
> with disabilities. Of the 54 million such people in the
> United States, 8 million to 12 million have severely
> impaired vision.
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> The technology allows the user to turn on a secondary audio
> channel, on which a narrator describes the action during
> pauses in the dialogue. (All televisions made in the United
> States since the early 1990's have such a channel.)
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> But broadcasters pointed out that in some markets the
> secondary channel is already used for Spanish and other
> foreign-language audio. The cost of providing video
> descriptions was another concern among broadcasters.
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> The Motion Picture Association of America challenged the
> rules in court, contending that the commission could not
> lawfully issue them.
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> "The F.C.C. can point to no statutory provision that gives
> the agency authority to mandate visual description rules,"
> the court said. "Congress authorized and ordered the
> commission to produce a report - nothing more, nothing
> less."
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> Jack Valenti, the president of the Motion Picture
> Association of America, said he welcomed the court's
> decision.
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> The association and member companies, Mr. Valenti said,
> "support video description on a voluntary basis, and we
> will continue to make available our filmed entertainment to
> as wide an audience as possible, specifically including the
> blind and those with impaired vision."
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> Michael K. Powell, chairman of the commission, did not
> comment on the decision today. But when the rules passed,
> he dissented, saying they went beyond the reach of the
> commission's statutory provisions.
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> "The commission can act only where it is authorized to do
> so," Mr. Powell said. "It is not free to act wherever it
> wishes."
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> The rules required that network-affiliated broadcasters in
> the top 25 television markets use the secondary channel for
> roughly four hours a week, either as prime-time or
> children's programming, beginning this spring.
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> In March and April, the major television networks rolled
> out the technology. Fox was the first to use the
> descriptions, adding spoken description to "The Simpsons."
> Officials at Fox were assisted by WGBH, a public station in
> Boston.
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> The commission modeled its video description rules on
> guidelines governing closed-captioning technology for the
> hearing impaired.
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> Public television has been active in the video description
> effort for more than a decade. WGBH, for example, began to
> narrate the popular programs "Masterpiece Theater" and
> "Nature" in the 1980's.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/09/national/09BLIN.html?ex=1037834308&ei=1&en
> =f8bf54dffe4eac19
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