NAB To Work With Consumer Groups on ENT Best Practices

NAB will work with consumer groups to develop a set of best practices for the electronic newsroom technique (ENT), the association said in an ex parte FCC filing posted Friday in docket 05-231 describing a Feb. 5 meeting with officials from Telecommunications for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing, the Hearing Loss Association of America and Gallaudet University's Technology Access Program. ENT involves creating captions for a live news broadcast by using the script for that broadcast rather than transcribing what is actually said. ENT is the best solution for increasing accessibility without straining the resources of broadcasters in small and medium markets, NAB said. The best practices identified by NAB and the consumer groups include captions formatted to increase readability, increased training at the station level, and more accurate scripting for weather segments, the filing said. ENT isn't broadcasters' long-term solution to the question of captioning news broadcasts but is the best solution until real-time captioning technology improves, NAB said.