LITTLE ROCK — The actress Marlee Matlin shimmied her way onto Dancing With the Stars two years ago, memorably using sign language to tell viewers to “read my hips.” But when Matlin, who is deaf, went to ABC.com to watch a replay of the show, she was impeded because the network’s videos were missing captions.
Closed-captioning is mandatory on television, but not on the Internet. And that has turned websites like ABC.com into battlegrounds for accessibility advocates like Matlin, who have spoken up about the lack of captions on sites like CNN.com and services like Netflix.
Media companies say they are working hard to make online video more accessible. YouTube, the world’s biggest video website by far, now supplies mostly accurate captions using voice-recognition software. ESPN is offering captions for its live streams of World Cup matches. And ABC now applies the TV captions for Dancing With the Stars to ABC.com.
But big gaps remain much to the dismay of deaf or hearing-impaired Web users. Television episodes on CBS.com, news videos on CNN.com and entertainment clips on MSN.com all lack captions, to name a few.
Other websites, like NBC. com, are inconsistent about captioning, so America’s Got Talent has captions, but The Marriage Ref does not.
As online video becomes ever more popular, deaf viewers face the prospect of a partially inaccessible Internet.
“We do not want to be left behind as television moves to the Internet,” said Rosaline Crawford, the director of the law and advocacy center for the National Association of the Deaf.
Groups like Crawford’s say they are merely fighting to maintain the access to television that they won a generation ago, in 1990, when Congress mandated closed captioning technology in virtually all TV sets, and in 1996, when Congress required most shows to have captions.
Advocates are pushing Congress to pass an update to the bill that would mandate captions on any online video that has also appeared on TV and would take other steps to make consumer electronics like remote controls with closed-caption buttons more accessible.
The prospect of legislation is motivating some major website operators to add captions more quickly.
A collection of industry groups is close to finishing a universal standard for online captions, which would make it easier to adapt TV captions to other formats.
Hulu.com, the biggest website for TV episode viewing, offers captions in multiple languages for some shows, but not all. It is pressing its content suppliers - networks and studios - for more captions.
At YouTube, captions can be viewed for any video uploaded since April, as long as it is in English and has a clear audio track.
Business, Pages 20 on 06/28/2010