FCC Proposes to Amend Audible Crawl Rule to Preserve Accessibility

The Federal Communications Commission adopted a proposal to amend the Audible Crawl Rule that would ensure that people who are blind or visually impaired continue to have access to the same critical details of an emergency as sighted viewers. The Commission’s Audible Crawl Rule requires the use of a secondary audio stream to convey televised emergency information aurally when such information is conveyed visually (e.g., in an onscreen text crawl or a small image like a weather radar map), so that it is accessible to people who are blind or visually impaired. To date, no technical solution exists for compliance with the audible crawl rule as it relates to graphics like a weather radar map, and the rule has been waived in part for the entirety of the nearly 11 years since compliance was required. This modified rule will stipulate that the rule is met if video programming providers or distributors provide textual crawls that convey emergency information duplicative of or equivalent to the visual, non-textual emergency information, as long as the text is conveyed aurally.