From AAPD (10.29.10):
Please Help Disseminate Survey About TV Captioning for Federal Enforcement Purposes
Deaf and hard of hearing consumer groups are working on a new Universal Captioning Petition to be submitted to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the federal agency that implements the captioning rules for television programming. The petition, by Telecommunications for the Deaf Inc (TDI), could lead to better enforcement of current captioning rules on TV. Current rules require 100 percent of all new TV programs to have captioning available, unless there is an allowable exemption. In many cases, the allowable exemption from captioning is out-of-date, not enforced, or no longer necessary as it reflects rules made over ten years ago, and should be removed.
People who use captioning on TV may include 28 million with hearing loss, 30 million for whom English is a Second Language, 27 million illiterate adults, 12 million children learning to read and 4 million remedial readers. Consumers are discovering that in many cases there is not the expected or desired level of captioning. All disability consumer groups that include people who watch TV and who use captioning are urged to disseminate the TDI survey that will provide data for a petition to be filed at the FCC by a number of national disability consumer groups. Participating groups include the American Association of the Deaf-Blind (AADB), American Association of People with Disabilities (AAPD), Association of Late-Deafened Adults (ALDA), California Coalition of Agencies Serving the Deaf and Hard of Hearing (CCASDHH), Communication Services for the Deaf (CSD), Deaf and Hard of Hearing Consumer Advocacy Network (DHHCAN), Hearing Loss Association of America (HLAA) and National Association of the Deaf (NAD). Please help get this survey disseminated so that the petition can include survey data by all users of captioning on TV. Thank you for your prompt participation. Survey is at http://survey.constantcontact.com/survey/a07e31o7ehbgeolbg6o/a01bkgftu2m9u/questions
The most serious problems begin when the disabled leave their homes. There are NO regulations on who may transport the A/D population (aging and/or disabled), no insurance requirements, and no licensure. The municipalities Accessible transportations are marvelous but that only covers a portion of the population. Absolute horrors are happening to the A/D population merely trying to get to or from an airport that does not have Super Shuttle or a licensed cab company that has, for example, wheelchair lifts.
In one SW city, there are two companies that haven't a clue how to transport the A/D population one running under an "angelic" aegis, and worse, they're both transporting patients for the city's hospitals, rehab centers, etc. much to the disdain of their own drivers! They don't know how to care for this population, much less those temporarily disconnected from IVs - interestingly, those are all after 10 PM!
One woman in a powerchair was raised above a van's roof, and then told to "double-over" stopping her ability to breathe having a partially-paralyzed diaphragm; then the company did not pick her up at the city airport on a return and left her at night for over 3 hours plus that city's airport had no security to help her. That is felonious assault under criminal law, but no one is addressing this, nor teaching the A/D population what to find out before getting into ANY accessible transportation vehicle. Project Action is doing nothing about this, either.
Accessible transportation is critically needed, and important, but responsibility and competence has to go hand in hand with such a service too. We have been sent links on the Internet about how to make one million dollars in a year by "transporting the disabled" - it's now a franchise operation.
Posted by: Advocacy for the Disabled | October 31, 2010 at 09:30 AM