'Reassert Leadership' on Accessibility, Advocates Ask Rosenworcel

"Reassert" leadership on accessibility issues, a coalition of deaf and hard of hearing advocates asked FCC acting Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel, per a filing posted Wednesday in docket 10-213. Telecommunications for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing, National Association of the Deaf, Gallaudet University Technology Access Program, Hearing Loss Association of America, American Council of the Blind, American Federation for the Blind, Samuelson-Glushko Technology Law & Policy Clinic at Colorado Law, and Georgetown Communications & Technology Law Clinic participated in the meeting. Several pending rulemakings and petitions should be "revisited and restarted" where the commission can "engage in proactive monitoring, develop remedies that offer meaningful incentives, and overhaul its consumer complaint process to be more user-friendly," the groups said. Develop standards as the FCC considers shifting to automatic speech recognition from IP captioned telephone services, they said: "Although human-assisted captioning has its imperfections, the ability to switch between the two forms of caption generation mitigates some of these issues for consumers."