Hulu.Com: Is This How it Is Going to Be?

Last night, I watched a captioned episode of The Simpsons on the relatively new internet television website, Hulu.com. Using the processor with an accessory connected to the computer, I was able to follow the captions. What fun. I wanted to watch more. But very little is captioned on Hulu.com at this time, so something like episodes of Silver Spoons is out of my reach.

There will be more internet television offerings like Hulu.com popping up as the old television broadcasters try to adjust to the internet and keep from losing advertisers. But will their offerings be captioned? That is the big question. As we know, they are NOT required to caption. Until the law changes, we deaf and hard of hearing people will have to be content with being thankful for what we are offered now. Hulu.com is working to improve the situation (see Jared Evans' blog) . However, what we *really* need is a law that prevents television broadcasters from setting up shop on the Internet unless they have captioning provisions already in place. Historically, what happens is that companies rush into a business to make money quickly and seize market share, and then go back and try to retrofit for the deaf and hard of hearing when they are pressured by complaints from the deaf community.

Coincidentially, while doing some cleaning up this morning, I came across an old (Jan/Feb 2008) issue of the NADMag, which had an article on captioning the internet. There was one paragraph in this article that I feel is important enough to share with About.com readers:

The NAD is advocating, through the Coalition of Organizations for Accessible Technologies (COAT) to change this law. [guide note: the law referred to is the Communications Act of 1934] First, COAT wants Congress to make clear that programs (live and pre-recorded) that must be captioned for television viewing must also be captioned when distributed over the INternet. Second, new programs provided by or generally comparable to programs provided by a television broadcast station that are distributed over the Internet should be captioned. These requirements would not apply to every online video. For example, captions would not be required for amateur videos on YouTube.

On a sort of related note, has anyone noticed that CNN.com seems to have stopped captioning its news clips? For awhile they had been offering captioned news clips that aired with captions shortly after the original broadcast. About a month ago I found that the CNN Video bookmark I had was no longer working.