As I attempted to pull up the closed captions on the Ravnsborg trial, I found myself stymied, because.. there aren’t any. Despite the fact that over 20% of the state’s population has some form of a hearing impairment?
There is also federal guidance on this, which brought me to note on Twitter – So, how does @SoDakPB broadcast the Ravnsborg impeachment trial, making it available on the internet, without any closed captioning? The FCC provides a couple of exemptions from closed captioning, such as the ability to claim an “undue burden” and at one time there was an exemption of only being “of local public interest.”
But, if YouTube has software which can do it on the fly nowadays, I’m not sure why public broadcasting would consider it an undue burden. And South Dakota is a big state. If they’re claiming a local exemption, I’d like to see what they mean by “local.”
Given how much of South Dakota’s funding comes from public sources, both State and Federal, and the number of people in the state who have hearing loss, I would think that providing captioning to go along with their coverage of the legislature would be more of a priority.
Do they ever provide closed captioning for their live coverage of the legislature? I don’t think they do.
And sorry to say, that never really dawned on me until I went to click on it, and it wasn’t there.
Strongly agree with PP.
CC should be available.