CNN captions all of its television broadcasts, as required by federal law, but none of its online content is captioned. In the suit, GLAD alleged that CNN and its owner, Time Warner, were violating state disability laws by denying full access to deaf Californians.
Lawyers for the network argued that having to provide captions would cause delays and inaccuracies, and that requiring a single network to provide them would be an infringement of its rights of free speech under the First Amendment. The judge rejected this argument on the grounds that the suit was directed to the format in which news clips were to be delivered and not their content.
As people increasingly watch news and other video content online, the issue of online captioning has become an urgent one for Deaf and hearing impaired consumers. In America, the 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act, which was passed in 2010, deals with this issue by requiring that online content which was previously broadcast on television with closed captions must also be captioned. The Federal Communications Commission recently issued a report on how these rules are to be applied. However, the act exempts online video clips of three minutes or less, which is how most of the video content on CNN’s website is delivered.
In an opinion piece on the Hassell Inclusion website, Professor Jonathan Hassell (who managed the introduction of closed captions on the BBC’s iPlayer online video service) outlined some of the issues here. Hassell notes that for a news service such as CNN it is essential that news clips be posted as soon as possible so that it has an advantage over competitors. This is why CNN’s lawyers invoked freedom of speech in arguing against the suit.
Hassell believes it would be unfair to force CNN to caption online news clips when its competitors do not have to and thinks it unlikely that laws will be enacted that enforce the captioning of such clips prior to their being posted. Instead he argues for a compromise, with broadcasters required to caption clips within a certain amount of time from their initial appearance online.
Find out how to caption videos in our Online Media section.
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