Deaf viewers and disability advocates have a reason to rejoice – Starting September 30, the FCC has ordered online video sites to start providing captions to their viewers. In the recent past, the lack of captions in online streaming videos has been a hot topic for debate, with deaf viewers complaining that the industry has not done much to accommodate their needs. However, with this new ruling, deaf and hard of hearing viewers will have a right to get access to captions in online videos.

Industry leaders like Youtube, Amazon, and Apple argued that they need more time, however, their plea literally fell on deaf ears. However, as of now, content providers are only required to provide just the captions and not the raw data, which means that viewers would not be able to change the font color and size as per their needs – they would have to wait 16 months to get that flexibility (early 2014). Also, this ruling covers only those contents that are created for both TV and web. Clips created by providers just for the web (news clips, webisodes, etc.) are not required to have captions starting September 30.

To read the ruling, visit this link.