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

From: New York Times
Nov. 8, 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.

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