DTV Access
NCAM is working on a number of fronts regarding the DTV Transition set by the Federal government to take place on February 17, 2009. Captioning and description services will continue at that time (just as they are presently available for both analog and digital television). We have authored papers on captioning and video description in DTV and provide links to these papers and a number of other resources from the Federal government (FCC and NTIA) and grass-roots efforts on access services and the DTV Transition below.
Resources
The Carl and Ruth Shapiro Family Foundation supported the development of the following outreach and policy papers about accessibility problems related to the DTV transition.
- When Good Captions Go Bad: A Story or Two About HDTV Accessibility
- Digital Television and Video Description: Service Continues, Consumer and Industry Efforts Required
News and Links
FCC
- Closed Captioning for Digital Television (DTV)
- Video Descriptions and the Digital Television Transition
- The DTV Transition - What You Need to Know about the DTV Transition
- DTV Transition Does Not Require Cable Systems to Switch to Digital
- Closed Captioning and Digital-to-Analog Converter Boxes for Viewing Free Over-the-Air Programming on Analog Televisions
- Publications on various topics including hooking up converter boxes, low-power TV and the transition, and buying the right TV
- FCC Public Service Announcements (PSAs) with captions and ASL
Other links
- TV Converter Box Coupon Program
- Digital Television Transition Coalition
- Captioned Public Service Announcements from DTVAnswers
- Captioned Public Service Announcements from NCTA
- WGBH Info and Captioned PSAs
- Evaluating Digital to Analog Converter Boxes for Users of Captioning
- For Engineers: Troubleshooting Digital Captioning Problems Beyond the TV
- Activating Digital Closed Captions From Pay TV Services
- Screen shots of converter box displays and DTV captioning
Problems and Complaints
NCAM has established a one-way e-mail address, dtvaccess@wgbh.org, as an aggregator of complaints and problems. If you send a report about a DTV access problem to this address, you will receive an automatic response that says that your report has been received and that we are gathering information but cannot respond to your inquiry, and that we will pass along common issues to relevant parties.
View an archive of NCAM's original DTV Access project, which ran from 1998-2004.
