Industry Trends

On June 25, 2015, the United States Department of Justice filed Statements of Interest weighing in on the current disability discrimination lawsuits against Harvard and MIT. Signatories include civil rights and disability rights lawyers, the counsel of the United States Department of…

What is the FCC Rule 79.1 (& How to Comply)?

3Play Media’s closed captioning service complies with the quality standards established by the FCC for accuracy, synchronicity, completeness, and placement as set forth in the FCC’s rules at 47 C.F.R. § 79.1(j)(2). We also comply with the best practices set forth in…

Spanish Subtitles vs. Spanish Closed Captions: What’s the Difference?

According to a Nielsen report, Hispanic Americans watch 62% more digital video than non-Hispanics. Combine that with recent FCC regulations for Spanish-language closed captioning, and you can expect to see huge demand for Spanish transcription services. American broadcast companies are accustomed to…

Video.js’s Approach to Video Player Accessibility

The original author of Video.js, Steve Heffernan, joined the expert panel at 3Play’s webinar on the future of video player accessibility. Play the video below to watch Steve’s presentation, or read on for highlights. What is Video.js? Steve Heffernan is the original…

YouTube’s Crowdsourced Fan Captions & Subtitles

At 3Play Media’s Future of Video Player Accessibility webinar, developers at Google and YouTube shared a new option for adding captions to YouTube videos: crowdsourced fan captions. What Are Fan Captions & Subtitles? Fan captions are caption files for YouTube videos that…

UK Subtitle Regulations for Higher Education and Online Learning

Transcription and captioning for online video has become a hot-button issue in American higher education, given the pattern of anti-discrimination lawsuits brought against universities for insufficient accommodation of deaf and hard of hearing students. While there are looser subtitling requirements in the…

Copyright Law vs. Accessibility Law: Is It Fair Use to Caption Videos You Don’t Own?

We recently hosted a webinar exploring copyright and fair use of captioning third-party educational video. The event featured legal expert Blake Reid, Assistant Clinical Professor in Technology Policy and Telecom Law at Colorado Law. Blake has worked on captioning regulations with deaf…

UK Subtitle Regulations for Television & Broadcast Media

UK Web Accessibility and Subtitle Regulations We’ve covered the various disability laws and FCC mandates that require closed captioning for video in the US, as well as how the AODA affects subtitling in Ontario, Canada. The United Kingdom has its own rules…

Caption Format Acronyms, Explained

If you’ve just started looking into how closed captioning works, you’ve probably come across terms for caption formats like SRT, SMPTE-TT, DFXP, WebVTT, etc. The list goes on. If you’re drowning in a sea of acronyms, here’s a breath of fresh air:…

Updated January 22, 2020

New FCC Consumer Help Center Makes It Easy To File Complaints About Closed Captions

Last month, the Federal Communications Commission launched a new consumer complaint website, the Consumer Help Center. The revamped site aims to simplify and speed up dispute resolution between consumers, the FCC, and providers. When consumers encounter video content that lacks closed captions…

by Sofia Enamorado in Video Accessibility

Why You Should Join the #WithCaptions Movement

Thanks to a recent Upworthy article, Twitter has been buzzing with the #WithCaptions hashtag. The article, titled “Pretty Much A No-Brainer. So Why Do So Many People WITH Brains Forget To Add This To Their Videos?” is a rallying cry to…

Updated January 26, 2021

FCC Requirements for Closed Captioning of Spanish and Bilingual English/Spanish Video Programming

by Lily Bond in Industry Trends

We’ve talked a lot about the FCC’s rules and regulations for closed captioning of broadcast television and IP-delivered video content. With the proliferation of Spanish and bilingual English/Spanish video content, we thought that we would address the FCC’s mandates for closed captioning…