Court Says Broadcasters Don't Have to Offer Technology for Blind

November 9, 2002
By THE NEW YORK TIMES









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.

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.)

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.

The Motion Picture Association of America challenged the
rules in court, contending that the commission could not
lawfully issue them.

"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."

Jack Valenti, the president of the Motion Picture
Association of America, said he welcomed the court's
decision.

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."

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.

"The commission can act only where it is authorized to do
so," Mr. Powell said. "It is not free to act wherever it
wishes."

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.

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.

The commission modeled its video description rules on
guidelines governing closed-captioning technology for the
hearing impaired.

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.

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/09/national/09BLIN.html?ex=1037834308&ei=1&en
=f8bf54dffe4eac19



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