Online captioning, policy, and Flow
As I try to shift back in to the school year – and blogging – after a busy first month of lecturing a class and defending my dissertation proposal, I’m excited to say that the Twenty-First Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act of 2010 passed the House today. This legislation, passed by the Senate over the summer, makes updates to existing laws regarding closed captioning and communications technology, requiring mobile devices to be able to display captions, and television content to retain its closed captioning when distributed online. For more information, visit the NAD’s page on this law. It’s a major change in accessibility legislation, and I am both excited and daunted by how this will change my research questions in the next few years.
It’s also great timing – I’ll be presenting at Flow Conference 2010 this weekend, as part of a roundtable on media policy, and I was using captioning as my key example of how academics can engage with policy. My full response paper (written before today’s news) behind the jump! (more…)