Deaf, Hard of Hearing Groups Seek Action on VRS Rates, IP CTS Metrics
Deaf and hard of hearing advocacy organizations asked the FCC to "quickly" act on its pending video relay service rates proceeding and set metrics for IP captioned telephone services, in separate meetings with aides to Commissioners Geoffrey Starks and Nathan…
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Simington, said an ex parte posted Thursday in docket 03-123. The FCC's "lack of oversight, coupled with rates that likely are too low to sustain human-captioner-based services and higher than needed to sustain [automatic speech recognition]-based services, appear to be fueling the trend of ASR-based solutions overtaking human-captioner-based solutions without the commission having a handle on the quality, privacy, and other tradeoffs involved in using ASR," said Telecommunications for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing, the National Association of the Deaf, Hearing Loss Association of America, Communication Service for the Deaf, American Council of the Blind, American Foundation for the Blind and the Samuelson-Glushko Technology Law & Policy Clinic at Colorado Law. The groups asked the FCC to implement the Disability Advisory Committee's recent recommendations on relay access to videoconferencing services and ensure multimodal services are "fully accessible to all people with disabilities." They also sought action on real-time text and device accessibility, accessibility for incarcerated individuals, and the "usability of closed captioning display settings."