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Earlier this month the United states Senate passed the Twenty-First Century Video Communications and Video Accessibility Act of 2010, which will require captioning of all online video that has previously been shown on television***.

Although the Act does not contain a schedule for captioning of online video, and still needs to be passed in to law by Barack Obama, this is an important juncture for web accessibility and will add impetus to the move towards an open standard for video captioning and implementation of that standard by all browser vendors.

Online-only content is not covered by the Act, so individual creators of content will largely remain exempt, but this Act will have massive implications for the television broadcasters. They will mostly already have access to a textual transcript of the show, which they are using to provide television captioning, so their main hurdle is providing a user-friendly mechanism for distributing online captions. Although they could presumably just plonk them all in a text file and link there from the video content, this doesn’t seem to be a very elegant solution.

Luckily, the working group maintaining the HTML standard have something to say about that: the Video Timed Track standard which has been very well defined recently by the WHATWG. Here’s Ian Hickson, the HTML spec editor, talking about his research and motivations in defining the Timed Track portion of the HTML video specification, on the WHATWG mailing list.

Although no similar Act exists in UK law explicitly covering online video, the disability Discrimination Act looks to be thorough enough to cover this area, should anyone wish to take someone to court over it. The UK Act states,

4.7 (p39): “From 1st October 1999 a service provider has to take reasonable steps to change a practice which makes it unreasonably difficult for disabled people to make use of its services.”

and also,

5.26 (p68): “For people with hearing disabilities, the range of auxiliary aids or services which it might be reasonable to provide to ensure that services are accessible might include … accessible websites.”

I don’t always agree that enforcing accessibility through legal mechanisms is the best way to achieve equal access to information for all. For public sector properties this method makes sense, but there’s something smelly about prescribing how privately owned companies should serve their media. But the US Act will at least have the effect of focusing media creators’ and browser vendors energies on accepting and using a commonly defined open standard.

***US television has its own rules regarding captioning. Previously, on January 1st 1998, January 1, 1998. the Federal Communications Commission effected rules which require people or companies that distribute television programs directly to home viewers to make sure those programs are captioned. Under the rules, 100 percent of nonexempt programs shown on or after January 1, 1998, must have been closed captioned by January 1, 2006, and 75 percent of nonexempt programs shown before January 1, 1998, must have been closed captioned by January 1, 2008).