ENT Captions Have Room to Improve, Advocates Tell FCC Forum

“We have for a long time expressed concerns about ENT,” said NAD Policy Counsel Zainab Alkebsi. “Consumers feel like there’s no effective means of communication.”

ENT is a method of quickly and inexpensively creating captions for local news by running the text of newsroom scripts in an onscreen crawl alongside the segments they describe. It’s cheaper than providing real-time captions, and the FCC permits it for top-four TV station affiliates outside the top 25 markets and for stations that aren’t top-four affiliates, and MVPD networks with a smaller national reach. “This is no niche issue,” said Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau Chief Patrick Webre. “Roughly 55 million TV households are outside of the larger cities where our rules require the gold standard of captioning, which is real-time captions.”

Consumer advocates focused on caption accuracy and a lack of outreach from stations to hearing impaired customers as being ENT issues. The agency requires captions be complete, synchronized to content, accurately reflect it, and placed so as not to obscure it. Gallaudet University Technology Access Program Director Christian Vogler said that inaccurate captions are a bigger problem than those out of sync. News and weather captions that don’t accurately convey what is being spoken “can impact human lives and health and safety,” Vogler said.

Station representatives said that their use of ENT has improved in recent years, and that many companies take steps to ensure such captions are as accurate as possible. Nexstar requires every segment that can be pre-scripted to be pre-scripted, and has internal audits where captions for randomly selected shows are checked, said Chief Technology Officer Brett Jenkins. WBRC Birmingham has begun making sure to script even “tosses” -- where one anchor hands off to another -- to make sure captions are more accurate, said General Manager Lantz Croft.

Jenkins and Croft said it's most difficult to provide ENT captions for breaking news because such events are being reported without a pre-written script. For emergency events, the only way stations can provide captions is by hiring a real-time captioner, Jenkins said. If a station follows a breaking news event long enough, there’s time for scripts for segments on the matter to be written, and ENT improves, they said.

Jenkins said that with current technology, screen placement is the easiest aspect of captioning to automate, but Croft said that modern newscasts are running out of screen room due to the many graphics commonly used. “Real estate on a TV screen is getting pretty tight,” he said. The size of a TV screen can affect how well placement works because on smaller screens, some consumers may need a larger font, Vogler said. The technology to provide automatic captions through voice recognition is not up to quality yet, Croft said.

Meredith Local Media General Counsel Joshua Pila and NAB Senior Director-Engineering and Technology Policy Kelly Williams urged hearing-impaired consumers and advocacy groups to reach out to their local stations to address captioning issues. Consumer advocates said those outlets should extend the first “olive branch.” Outreach is “nonexistent from TV stations across the country,” said Claude Stout, executive director of Telecommunications for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing. Consumers often aren't sure how to get in touch with TV stations or aren't aware that's an option, advocates said.

Broadcasters often serve large populations but are open to being contacted by groups with caption concerns, said Pila. He uses hearing aids and captions himself and handles caption complaints for Meredith along with his general counsel duties. “I don’t want people walking away from this thinking TV stations are twiddling their thumbs,” he said.