When the 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act (CVAA) came out, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) added a process for reporting captioning problems.
Not long after the law passed, I reported my first captioning issues to the FCC through that process. The reporting process is lengthy. They’ll ask questions to confirm whether it’s the service provider or the local affiliate network. It was a lot of back and forth. Because of that tedious experience, I never did it again for years.
In 2023, I had to submit a report about ION. There have been multiple shows and episodes that blanked out words in captions that were heard and not bleeped. If they had sanitized the captions AND the audio, I wouldn’t complain. It didn’t matter what show, what day it aired, what time it aired, or anything. ION repeatedly censored the captions but not the audio.
When I spot a captioning issue, I contact the source, like the network or program. In this case, I opened a ticket with ION. I reported on the problem and explained why it was a problem.
Here’s the only meaningful response I received from ION.
“This was an episode that was edited prior to Scripps acquiring Ion. We are in the process of fixing this episode and comb through other episodes to make sure the captions match the dialogue. We do not edit out the word gay or any conversations about being gay, but we will aim to fix any captions that were wrongfully omitted.”
I found this inaccurate because the Scripps acquisition of ION was completed in 2021. These sanitized episodes are still airing three years later. After a few responses, it was clear they were not going to do anything about my reported issue. That’s when I decided to report it to the FCC.
Here’s what I put in the FCC report.
“ION TV has repeatedly sanitized the captions but not the audio. One episode had ‘gay’ multiple times. It was erased from captions every time, but not the audio. They’ve also sanitized ‘damn,’ ‘ass,’ ‘hell,’ and others. This happens both on TV and streaming. It’s not a network problem.
“It does not matter what show, time, or date. They do it consistently. They’ve done it multiple times on Chicago Fire and Law & Order: SVU. I have a friend in Illinois seeing the same problem on streaming. I’ve checked it on streaming and over the air. It happened in both.
“This sanitizing does not happen on the same shows when they’re on NBC or Hulu. It’s an ION issue. I reported it to ION and replied to all their messages. They said they were looking into it and closed the ticket without resolution.
Reporting Captioning Problems in 2011
Thomas Logan: Hello everyone. This is Thomas Logan from Equal Entry, here with Ken Nakata of Converge Accessibility and Meryl Evans. In this episode of A11yInsights, we’re talking about the process of filing a complaint for noncompliance with captioning to the Federal Communications Commission, the FCC.
And we’re very happy today to have our special guest Meryl Evans, a captions expert. So Meryl, can you tell us about the first time you reported an issue to the FCC?
Meryl Evans: Yes, Thomas. I dug up my old email so I make sure I get my facts straight and the email was dated 2011, which is after the CVAA went into effect in 2010. I watched Grey’s Anatomy and Modern Family.
The captions screwed up in the middle of the show and I reported it to the FCC and they said I needed to report it to the local affiliate and my cable provider at the time. The local affiliate was nice enough to reach out to my provider for me. At some point, it resolved itself.
Thomas Logan: When you said at some point, do you recall? I know it was a long time ago, but it still probably took a fair amount of time, or do you remember if it was prompt, or did it feel like it took a long time?
Meryl Evans: What I remember was it was frustrating because there were show after show on the same network that were having captioning problems consistently, regularly and FCC was thinking it could be my provider’s problem or it could be my local affiliate. But I’m like, if it all happening on one network, I would think it’s not my cable provider, it would have to be the affiliate with the national network.
Eventually, nothing came of it. It just resolved itself eventually, as most captioning problems tend to do.
Thomas Logan: I think that’s interesting as well that asking the person who’s reporting the issue to do all of this extra work is burdensome and it’s a lot of time to actually provide all that information.
And to your point, I think for the FCC in how people report these issues, understanding if people see that there’s numerous issues occurring with a network, that’s more indicative of that network or that provider’s choice, not some malfunction with your set-top box, but it really does remind me of when I have to call for other customer support incidents with other companies and they just read from a stock script of answers. So it’s very frustrating.
Meryl, you also had a recent experience reporting a captioning issue to the FCC in the near term. Can you tell us about that experience?
Reporting ION Captioning Problems
Meryl Evans: Yes. In October 2023, a friend of mine contacted me telling me about how ION TV was sanitizing captions that were hard and said. She’s a hearing person, so she knows it was said. And the captions showed a blank where the word would appear and I am like “This is a problem because if you’re going to sanitize, you have to do both the audio and the captions. You can’t just do captions.” So my first step was to contact the company, which was ION TV, and I got into those tech support systems.
Nothing came that. I was not getting the right answer. So the next step was to report to the FCC, which I tried not to do considering my past experience. But this was a repeatable problem. It was reproducible and after a little bit of time passed, I got a response from FCC with a CC to ION representative. And then in November, I got a response from ION TV representative.
Thomas Logan: So Ken, could you take a look at that response? What do you think of what you’re seeing and how they responded to Meryl’s complaint?
Ken Nakata: Okay, so in the November 28th response that Meryl got, which also looks like it was sent to the FCC, and then also Meryl was carbon copied on it. It looks like they used an automated system to flag certain words in the captions. And they had an editor they say it’s a former editor, so it sounds like he may have been removed, to change certain words in the captions that may have been deemed profanities to bleep them out of the captions, but they do recognize that they have an obligation to make sure that the captions are accurate.
And so they say that they’re going to try and correct that issue going forward. And then they had another response, I guess it was almost a month later, that explained how the process happened. So apparently the broadcast from CBS was fine, and it was sent digitally through a secure transfer to the station that delivered the content, but ION went ahead and updated the captions at that point in the process, which I think is kind of interesting. And now they’re going through the laborious process of fixing that and making sure it doesn’t happen in the future. So yeah, it does sound like they’re admitting that they messed up on this.
Thomas Logan: Meryl, what was your feeling when you received these responses? How did it make you feel?
Meryl Evans: Well, I am a customer and I don’t appreciate getting a letter in lawyer-speak. Because it’s too confusing, and after I got that, I let it go for a while because I have more important things to do with my time. And then my friend followed up a few months later saying, “They’re still doing it!”
And she wanted me to go into a lot more detail than I wanted to because I believe if you go into too much detail, it distracts from the problem.
And, in my recent exchange which was a few weeks ago, they said, “We explained in our previous letter that we are going to continue sanitizing captioning based on our guidelines.”
See I didn’t even make that interpretation when I read the letter. So after they said that clearly in an email, I said, “That’s not my problem. My problem is you are sanitizing the captions. You are not sanitizing the audio. If you’re going to sanitize the captions, you must sanitize the audio, or neither.”
And they said that they’re researching and they will get back to me. I followed up and said, when are you going to get back to me? And I have not heard from them since.
ION Representative Responds to Captioning Complaint
Thomas Logan: I find this so frustrating and I’m sorry that that is the experience that you had. I definitely also was having a big reaction to the idea that ION has a set of standards and practices that how is that going to be unique from what already exists in the web content accessibility guidelines?
And I completely agree with you. Like, if you want that to be your standard in practice, you have to make the audio equivalent changed because how is that a standard in practice that you only do that to captions, but you don’t do it to audio? So I think that’s like completely the right response, but again, this is maybe throw back to Ken.
Ken Nakata: And looking at their letter, it sounds as though they are contradicting themselves. Because this December letter and the November letter suggest that certain words are being wrongfully deleted out of the captions and they’re adding them back.
I mean it says it right there in the third to last paragraph on December 21st that “Scripps is therefore undertaking the laborious process of scanning, programming, broadcast by ION using the automated system to make sure certain words that were wrongfully deleted are added back to the captions.”
So, it sounds as though that contradicts what they’re saying later of, “Oh well, as we explained earlier we’re always making sure to delete inappropriate words.” It sounds like they’re talking out of both sides of their mouth. So, you know…
Thomas Logan: I just wanted to chime in there that I was offended by the word laborious, because they just said that it came with closed captioning adhering to the rules from CBS, and now they’re saying they have to laboriously go through and add things back in. It’s like, your software removed those words. So it sounds like you’re saying it already came to you fully accessible.
You ran something that removed the words, and now you’re laboriously going back through to add them back in. I don’t understand that. It’s like, why did you remove them in the first place? You created the labor yourself.
Meryl Evans: I just emailed them again with a BCC to you both. Asking once again, when are you going to get back to me? When are you going to complete this process and get back to me? Together, my friend and I, we have spent way too much time on it. The last round when she sent me the episodes, the words that were sanitized, I sent that to FCC.
And FCC wanted the episode time, the station or network where it was viewed, the geography, the area, the date. They wanted more details and my friend and I are tired because we’ve complained about it. We’ve given them details in the past and I don’t think we have to keep doing this after we’ve already proven it’s a consistent problem. I would think FCC should be able to take this over and monitor them themselves. That’s what I think should be happening because it’s their job. I am just a customer here.
How Can We Improve the Captioning Problem Reporting Process?
Thomas Logan: Well, I think that’s a great segue to this, our last topic. Like, how can we make recommendations to improve this process? And it sounds like that’s the first one. There is an assumption and expectation that if the FCC receives a notice about a problem and someone makes a commitment to fixing the problem, that there would be a check back from the FCC that they actually addressed the issue because they’re the one handling it.
So I agree with that idea, number one. Ken or Meryl, do you have any other ideas on like what could be done now to make this process easier?
Ken Nakata: Well, I don’t know what the Disability Rights Office is like over at the FCC, and I have no idea whether they’re overwhelmed or not, but I would think that if you know the date and time that you watched a show, just what episode you were watching from your local cable provider, or whatever other means of broadcast, that from, the FCC should be able to just contact that entity and then that entity will go and do the research.
And then looking at the letter that Meryl got from Scripps on both occasions, and particularly the one from December, it was pretty clear that they knew exactly how they got the captioned files and the actual broadcast. And it’s clear that they knew what the whole chain of custody of what was happening. And so they could figure out who was at fault and it ended up being Scripps.
There’s no reason for a consumer to do any other research than that. And it almost sounds like it doesn’t matter how understaffed the Disability Rights Office is, as long as the FCC sends the complaint to that local cable provider, that they should be able to get that information, and they did!
But, in terms of the other process, it sounds like so much burden is being put on the consumer, and I can understand why they do that, because the FCC might assume that, “Well, Meryl might not know how to use, turn on the captioning on her set box, or in her TV set,” which makes sense if you’re talking about, say, older users who might be relatively new to having a disability, but they should also be responsive to the number of complaints that are being filed just with respect to a particular episode on a particular cable provider that if they start getting complaints from multiple people.
I think it’s fairly safe to assume that the cable provider is messing up somehow or somebody along that chain is messing up and it’s not the consumer that’s messing up because they’re getting multiple complaints about it.
Meryl Evans: And but the thing is, they probably have not gotten complaints from anyone because the process is too laborious. And a lot of people don’t even know they can report it to the FCC. But if somebody like me who’s done it before knows about it, avoids it as much as possible that will tell you they’re never going to get a whole bunch of us to do it!
Submitting these complaints is just a lot of work. I understand why when you first filed the complaint, they wanted to know the dates, the time, the network, your geography, your location because there are so many networks out there that they can’t begin to know where to investigate. So, I understand that.
But I think once I’ve done that part, and I should let it go, and go back to being your customer and let them know, “Oh, it’s still happening. It’s not fixed.”
Ken Nakata: Yes, that is exactly right. Ideally, there should be some web-based form that you can go to. Some URL, and then it just asks you just for those required bits of information. You log the complaint, you hit the submit button, and then it’s now their job to go and investigate it.
Meryl Evans: It is a web-based form, just a very detailed one. Once you select captions or whatever the problem was, then it expands and it’s a long form.
Ken Nakata: But there’s only like five pieces of information that you need, basically where you’re located, what your network provider is, what the episode date and time are, that’s it. Oh, well, that’s four pieces of information. Oh, maybe your email address.
Thomas Logan: And a timestamp of where the issue occurred. I think the time of when the issue occurred is helpful, but it makes it very indicative. Another idea, I believe we’ve discussed Netflix may have this functionality, but with digital, of course, we have a lot more opportunities to improve this.
And as things continue to move more and more digital, all of that information with a URL, and timestamp, pretty much all of that should be potentially available on technology. Meryl, what do you think?
Meryl Evans: Yes, I love how Netflix does it. But of course Netflix is a streaming provider. They’re not a TV provider, but ION TV does both TV and streaming. And that network at some point, Netflix makes it so easy, they have a button with a flag. You just select that button and you can report a captioning or other problems very easily.
But if you’re on TV, you won’t be able to do that. That’s only available if you’re using a laptop or a computer or a mobile device. It doesn’t work on a TV. But I wish that kind of thing would be available across networks, across devices, including television.
Thomas Logan: And also, what about an idea of pause the screen on your TV and take a picture with your smartphone? Again, can’t assume everyone has a smartphone, but as far as more efficiently getting that information, most TVs do display all that information with some info guides. So if there was a way to shortcut it, just speeding it up for people.
Don’t make the burden be on people with disabilities reporting issues. And I think this is just a big topic across many episodes we’ve done on A11y Insights, but it’s this expectation of when people say they’re going to fix something in 45 days, or they’re going to fix something in 90 days, whoever checks on that, whoever goes in and says, “Did you fix it?”
It’s great to have a legal framework and process of communicating this information, but who actually goes back in and like tests that it actually did it and this feels like another example where it doesn’t feel like it’s getting checked back on and revalidated back on the user again to re log the issue and that’s very frustrating.
Ken Nakata: Yes.
Thomas Logan: So with that, I think this is a great conversation. We’d love to hear from you all. Let’s continue the conversation. What do you all think about this? What do you think about the CVAA and the FCC reporting requirements? Just in general to what do you think about making people with disabilities provide information to report to vendors that they’re not accessible?
What are better ways that this could be followed up on?
Thank you so much for your time and we will see you in our next episode.
Update: ION TV continues sanitizing the captions, not the audio. The FCC contact person has not been responsive to messages about this.
References
- FCC Consumer Inquiries and Complaints Center
- FCC Forum on Captioning
- ION
- National Association of the Deaf on Filing Closed Captioning Complaints
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