Picture this: You are deaf and naked, having just stepped out of the bathtub. All you are wearing is a towel. Suddenly, police appear in front of you, pointing guns at you. When the police order you to show your hands, you don't understand. Then the police taser you.

This happened just under two years ago in November 2007 to Donnell Williams. The police had been responding to a false call about a shooting, so they broke into his home. Naturally, Mr. Williams sued, and now the city of Wichita, Kansas has offered him $50,000 in a settlement.

If this happened to you, would you accept a settlement offer of $50,000?

Early in the morning of June 25, frustrated by the lack of captions on the Internet, I started the Facebook grassroots cause Caption Action 2. Coincidentally, the next day, on June 26, Representative Ed Markey re-introduced the 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act of 2009 (HR 3101) on Capitol Hill.

We only have until January 2011 to get this important Act to pass Congress. (To see how much time we have left, check the companion blog for Caption Action 2, which has a countdown counter.) After that, the bill will disappear. If you are a parent of a deaf or hard of hearing child, this bill will have a major impact on your child's future!

It may sound like we have plenty of time but we actually don't have plenty of time. Congress has been in session six months already, so we have already lost six months because the bill was not introduced until late June. A bill needs many cosponsors to be successful, and at this time the bill has only two cosponsors (Reps. Linda Sanchez (CA) and Barbara Lee (CA)). Not only that, we have to get someone in the Senate to introduce a similar bill. Write to your Congressional Representatives and Senators. If you do write to your Congresspersons, could you let me know? Caption Action 2 is trying to compile statistics on how many actually write to Congress.

I had blogged here at About.com last June 2008 about the first bill, but nothing came of it. That first bill died in the House committee and had few cosponsors (just 15), never even reaching the point of getting a hearing. As far as I know, a companion bill was never introduced in the Senate. Now we have a second chance, and we might not get a third chance. I am determined to see this bill pass, so in addition to being a guide for About.com, I have taken on the role of a leader of Caption Action 2.

Long ago, I was one of the leaders of the first Caption Action, a grassroots movement to get captions on home video (In the 1980s, very little home video was captioned). When the lack of captions on the Internet became a fast-growing problem, it made sense to call this new grassroots movement Caption Action 2. Plus, calling it Caption Action 2 reminds people that there was once a successful first Caption Action, the key word being success.

Caption Action 2 is a grassroots movement supporting the efforts of the professional organizations the Coalition of Organizations for Accessible Technology (COAT), the National Association of the Deaf, and TDI. If you are not a member of either NAD or TDI, now is the time to join as they will be needing a lot of support in order to get this bill through Congress. COAT will also need a lot of support.

Last but not least, knowing the importance of publicity to getting the word out (and influencing Congressional representatives), I approached my fellow guides at About.com. Two About.com guides responded by blogging about the bill and Caption Action 2:

• About.com Guide to Kids' Movies and TV: Closed Caption Online
• About.com Guide to Special Needs Children: Site of the Day: Caption Action 2
• About.com Guide to Animated TV: Get Closed Captions Required Online

It is a start, but we need more publicity for the bill. If you are an appropriate reporter (e.g. someone who writes about the Internet, Internet Technology, or Television) or know an appropriate reporter, please contact me at deafness.guide@about.com. You can also help by spreading the word about the bill, and about Caption Action 2. With your help, we CAN get this bill through Congress!

Ed Bosson has done it again. This week he called our attention to fraud committed by VRS agencies. On his blog, Bosson provided copies of publicly available documents from the FBI. I read these documents throughout, and what I read was amazing.

Here are the facts that I pulled from the two PDFs provided by Bosson.

ICSD PDF

The ICSD PDF states that the FCC-OIG has tracked a"dramatic increase"in payouts to VRS providers from the TRS Fund. For example , in January 2005 - $10.8 million representing 1.4 million VRS minutes was paid. By January 2009 that had skyrocketed to.$51.2 million paid representing 8.1 million VRS minutes.

How were so many minutes generated? The huge increase was the result of fraudelently generated minutes. Fraudulent minutes were generated through non-interpreted "run calls" also known as "revenue calls."

A "run call" was a call to a long recording such as a podcast. At one VRS company, most of the calls made were run calls. Video interpreter logins were even used to make run calls.

That's not all. Video relay interpreters told to provide callers with numbers to call if a call ended.

Hawkins PDF

According to the Hawkins PDF, callers from China were making run calls. These callers were allegedly paid to make the calls. Video relay interpreters could even see that some run callers were making multiple VRS run calls at the same time.

Finally, when the legitimate call volume was low, video relay interpreters called themselves to generate minutes.

Guide Comments

I had seen Ed's blog earlier but was not really aware of what this was about until this morning when an interpreter told me that a VRS agency had been visited by the FBI and that 3 or 4 call centers were closing today. Many young and uncertified interpreters lost their jobs.

According to the interpreter, video relay interpreters who saw what was going on became fed up and complained to the FCC which then called in the FBI because the FCC does not have the authority that the FBI does to investigate criminal matters.

I can't help but wonder what can possibly prevent this kind of fraud from happening in the future. It sounds like it may be easy to commit this kind of fraud. What safeguards, if any, can be built into the VRS system? If you had a business whose profit depended on the volume of calls made to your business, wouldn't you have an incentive to keep that volume up even if it meant fraud? Is the answer to drop the per-minute payment and just make a flat payment to VRS service providers?

In my opinion, VRS fraud happens not because of what the per minute rate is, but because these companies' profits depend on the revenue brought in by the number of minutes. How do you remove that incentive? Do you have to nationalize the VRS agencies, turning them into Federally-run agencies instead of Federally-reimbursed agencies?

Ticklerkid on the forum is frustrated by the inaccessibility of podcasts, and wants to know if there is any software that can convert podcast speech to text. One respondent mentioned voicewriting. Is there any other software out there (besides the function in Windows Vista and Dragon software) that can do what Ticklerkid wants?