COAT advocates for accessibility and usability of technology for people with disabilities. Enacting the 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act (21st CVAA) was a huge step forward and we are working to implement this new law. COAT’s overall aim is to ensure accessibility, usability, and affordability of all broadband, wireless, and Internet technologies for people with disabilities.

LinkedIn Poll Indicates Awareness about Captioning, Less about Video Description

Two quick polls were conducted the fall of 2009 on LinkedIn, a popular business-oriented social networking site that allows members to devise polls.Two questions were asked in separate polls. One was "Do you know how to turn on Closed Captioning on your TV?" and the other was "Do you know how to turn on Video Description on your TV?" The intent was to see if this well-educated and generally technologically-sophisticated group would know about these disability accessibility modes on television.

Not unsurprisingly, with the captioning question, two-thirds answered "Yes, I know how to turn it on." Significantly, however, two-thirds were either "unsure" or "not familiar" with turning on Video Description, with 16% asking "What's Video Description?".

It is not known if the respondents were disabled or not. The majority were men in their 30s and 40s, mostly working in public relations, management or academia.

If these two snapshot polls are any indication of what the general population knows, it seems to indicate that although captioning is more widely known than video description as commonly-understood TV accessibility features, it is quite likely that there remains a lack of general awareness about video description, and how to turn on this feature on TVs.

Polls are on the LinkedIn website as follows:

Captioning

Video description

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Andrew Phillips, National Association of the Deaf; Eric Bridges, American Council of the Blind; Mark Richert, American Foundation for the Blind; and Jenifer Simpson, American Association of People with Disabilities, outside the FCC building, Washington DC, after meetings on pending rules under 21st CVAA.

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