In a recent agreement with the National Association for the Deaf (NAD), Netflix has agreed to add captions to all its contents by the year 2014, thus making its entire catalog accessible to 48 million deaf users. Currently, 82% of Netflix’s content is already captioned.
The company would also add captions on new content within 30 days by 2014; within 14 days by 2015, and within 7 days by 2016. This agreement brings to an end a class action lawsuit that NAD had filed in 2010 claiming that by not providing captions, Netflix was out of compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act.
There are over a thousand devices that stream Netflix content. Most of these are capable of showing captions too. Netflix will do its best to make all the devices show captions, however, it is not obligated to do so.
As part of the agreement, Netflix would be paying $755,000 in legal fees to the plaintiff’s lawyers, and $40,000 for implementing the decree.
Source: Ars Technica