The House recently submitted a draft bill, the "21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act." In this bill, the House proposes to amend the Communications Act with more robust consumer protections and provisions to make television and the Internet more accessible. Specifically relevant to CaptionMax and its consumers and customers are the certain provisions under Title II, Video Programming, including (emphasis added):
Closed-Captioning Decoder and Video Description Capability. Sec. 201 –– This section expands the scope of devices that must display closed captions under the Television Decoder Circuitry Act of 1990 from the present requirement of television sets with screens that are 13 inches or larger, to all video devices that receive or display video programming transmitted simultaneously with sound, including those that can receive or display programming carried over the Internet. The section also requires these devices to be able to transmit and deliver video descriptions. Video description is the provision of verbal descriptions of the on-screen visual elements of a show provided during natural pauses in dialog.
Video Description and Closed Captioning. Sec. 202. – This section reinstates the FCC’s modest regulations on video description. Those rules, originally promulgated in 2001, were struck down by a U.S. Court of Appeals for lack of FCC authority. This section also authorizes the FCC to promulgate additional rules to (1) ensure that video description services can be transmitted and provided over digital TV technologies, (2) ensure that digital TV equipment can make available the delivery and use of video description, (3) require non-visual access to on-screen emergency warnings and similar televised information and (4) increase the amount of video description required. Finally, this section adds a definition for video programming to include programming distributed over the Internet to make clear that the existing closed captioning obligations (and future video description obligations) contained in Section 713 apply to video programming that is distributed or re-distributed over the Internet. This section is intended to ensure the continued accessibility of video programming to Americans with disabilities, as this programming migrates to the Internet.
The above text is from COAT's summary of the bill's key provisions: http://coataccess.civicspaceondemand.org/node/57
Here is a link for the full text of the bill.
If you support this draft, you may want to call your congressperson and let them know!