This is being provided in a rough-draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings.
WILL SCHELL: I'm Will Schell. I worked at the California protection and advocacy as an attorney, and HHS, OCR working on Olmstead issues for a number of years.
And then I moved to the FCC's Disability Rights Office where there's actually a whole bunch of really cool and innovative disability rights laws that have a huge impact on people with disabilities that don't get mentioned in the long list of like ADA, 504. They go down the list of all the disability rights laws, and they never mention the 21st century Communications and Video Accessibility Act or the CVAA.
So in order to make this presentation particularly exciting, I recalled the movie "Pump up the Volume" that when I was younger, it was an FCC character in that movie.
Now that I work at the FCC, I think about it quite a bit.
So we're happy that you're all here.
And it's a nice opportunity to come and join together with Disability Rights Advocates, I think especially during this particular time, it can feel a little lonely working in the feds.
Stephen and I, working at the FCC. It's not an agency that gets a ton of attention, but, if you have not watched the movie "Pump up the Volume" starring Christian Slater from 1990, you don't have to because I'm going to summarize it for you.
(Laughter)
In that movie, the FCC is the bad guys, trying to stop Christian Slater, who is a teenager in high school. And Christian, like every teenager, is misunderstood and has a lot of feelings about things.
And he wants to share all of his feelings with the world and what he, the way that he does that is through a pirate radio. The local town in particular the teenagers become infatuated with his pirate radio. I think after school he talks about, you know, how mean the faculty is at school and things like that.
It's actually interesting because I have very particular thoughts about "Pump up the Volume" from 1990, but then when I was reading about what happened in this movie, a lot of it I did not remember. And there's a lot of stuff that I don't think would be included in a movie today, or at least not as kind of in the way that they included it.
So ultimately, one of his listeners calls in, says, you know, how upset they are about the school faculty. And Christian Slater, who goes by the name Happy Harry Hard On, I don't know why that made it through, he kind of dismisses this call for help. This person who called in was really kind of expressing a lot of being upset.
And he's like, get over it, grow up, or whatever.
And then that student committed suicide, and the radio host, Christian Slater, like was very upset by that. And he makes it his mission to kind of call out these authority figures.
And the school gets ahold of the FBI -- not the FBI. Sorry -- the FCC so take down this pirate radio station that's causing all sorts of trouble and the FCC characters drive around in a white van with antennas trying to triangulate the location of this pirate radio station.
And it all culminates in Christian Slater is always one step ahead of "the man."
Ultimately, they get into a Jeep with a mobile broadcast system and he's driving around and the police and the FCC are chasing after him, and laying down the law.
And he's trying to use this as a first amendment free speech thing.
Now, I have a lot of experience in disability rights law, but Stephen has a lot of experience in telecom law or FCC law. Stephen assures me that pirate radio is still not allowed and that we would definitely take Christian Slater down.
(Laughter)
But the point that I wanted to make by pointing out "Pump up the Volume," not only as being more exciting than federal government is going to tell you about their disability rights rules, was that we're not actually the villains; we're secretly actually like pushing really innovative disability rights laws that agencies like the P&As can utilize pretty regularly.
So that's where I kind of wanted to start this off.
We have shifted, if we want to stick with the 1990s theme of like pirate radio as being the place where young teenagers can express themselves, now young teenagers have a bazillion places to express themselves on the internet. And what you will find out is that it has to be accessible. So what these teenagers will find is that they have to be able to get online and communicate with everyone else. There's other things besides online.
And I'm just going to run through a bunch of our various rules at a high level, and then we're going to dive into new and cool FCC things.
So at a very high level, the FCC regulates TVs and telephones, and the various things around that.
In general, TVs and telephones have to be accessible. The CVAA from 2010, right, a very recent disability rights law, expanded that into modern communication technologies. So in 1990 when Christian Slater was using the wireless phone that was plugged into his neighbor's house, so the base station was plugged into his neighbor's house, he had the wireless phone, that lack of a wire was how he defeated the FCC at one point because they thought he was at a physical location but literally he was next door with a wireless phone.
That was like pushing the envelope.
And now we all have cell phones where we can just -- no one is calling people anymore, right? We're all texting and doing other forms of communication.
But under our CVAA rules, everyone has the right to access those telecommunications services and the equipment in a way that makes it accessible to them. Nobody can be left behind. It's a broad disability rule. It says, "people with disabilities" and there's some clarify language that breaks down how specific areas might be accessible, but very broadly all people with disabilities have to have access to these old school communication technologies and new school technologies.
Telephones.
All right. I'm going to go through this list real quick. Telephones and telephone services have to be accessible to people with disabilities.
They also have to be compatible with screen readers and Braille displays or other specialized consumer premises equipment as we call it, but just any specialized equipment that you need in order to access the telephone network, the telephone network has to remain compatible and accessible.
Telephone services includes all of the weird things that you might think it would, like call forwarding and call waiting and IVR system. This is that system where you call and it says, "press 1 for English and press 2 for Spanish" and all those systems to kind of like navigate through a company's phone system, those have to be accessible.
Voice mail services have to be accessible.
And then all of the other systems within the telephone company like billing and the user manuals for these phones have to be accessible to people with disabilities.
The phone companies actually have a pretty strong obligation to also be able to tell people with disabilities how they've made their services and equipment accessible. So we've even had circumstances where telephone companies, because they didn't have a clear way of providing this information, they had to do like one-on-one training with someone in order to kind of show them how their particular phone could be accessible to them.
Let me shift over to televisions and other devices that play video programming. The user interface of televisions, they have to be accessible to people who are blind. A lot of the content that is on TV has to be accessible to people who are Deaf and some to people who are blind.
So actual set top boxes for cable companies, that has to be accessible to people who are blind, and then the closed captions for the content has to be available to people broadly.
That means that there's a screen reader built into not only your cable box but also Apple TV, Roku TV, Amazon Firestick. And it's important to tell people that those things are built in. There's a lot of, in particular, people who lose their vision later in life who don't realize that actually TV is still accessible to them. If they press a few buttons, they can still read the program guide and menu and schedule the recording for their show.
And there is also audio description of course. If you're not familiar, audio description is where a person will describe the key visual elements of a scene, and they usually just kind of say it in between the dialogue of a program. So right in between a dialogue between two characters, a narrator will jump in and say something like "they're standing on top of a bridge," or something, just describe where they are and what's happening.
Audio description exists. It's a fairly limited rule. Nothing nearly as expansive as closed captions.
But both of those rules we cover.
And in case you're wondering, captions in general, all programming has to be captioned, including if it's ever aired on TV and then moved to the internet, then it also has to be captioned with limited exceptions for both of those circumstances.
Let me switch to internet communications.
Now we're living in the modern world. We're no longer in 1990 where Christian Slater is just across the street and defeating the FCC.
Modern communication also has to be accessible under our more current rules. That includes text messaging and email. I think -- I'll just stop right there. Just kind of pause for a moment and let people sink in the idea that all email has to be accessible to all people with disabilities under the FCC's rules.
And we have a lot of circumstances where email ends up not being accessible just for odd reasons. New security challenge shows up. And because of someone's disability, they can't get past that security challenge to access their email. That would be an example of email not being accessible to someone with a disability.
Instant messaging or chat. I was on the -- it's everywhere now. I was on the Lowe's website, home hardware center, and they have this pop up that gets in my way. Because I have everything magnified, right? I have low vision so I have everything blown up really big, and this pop up is a chat app so you can chat with customer service and I only know it's there because it blocks my whole screen and I have to try to get rid of it.
But that has to be accessible to people with disabilities, whether you use magnification or screen reader or some other form of computer technology to access the internet.
Audio conference services. So voice conference services. As we lovingly call it in the FCC, non-interconnected voice over internet protocol. Or internet voice chat is a nicer way to say it.
That would be stuff like Twitter spaces, if you've ever experienced that. I think during the pandemic there was a cool voice group chat service --
>> Is it Discord?
WILL SCHELL: They are definitely covered. Or did you say Discourse? That might be a different one. I don't know. But they're all covered. If they have audio, if they have text, and they have people who are communicating with each other, then it's covered by our rules. It has to be accessible under our rules.
And a couple examples that I have in mind is talking with your friends on video games which we're going to talk more about.
Text chatting on dating apps. If you're trying to date people, I hear it's on the internet now and you have to have an app. Those apps if they allow you to communicate with other people, they would have to be accessible under our rules.
So those are just some of the examples. I'm sure by tomorrow there will be new innovative ways to communicate with people that would also be covered under our rules.
I just want to mention the NDBEDP, which I can only say super fast. This is the iCanConnect program that the FCC uses to get equipment and training to people who are DeafBlind and who do not have the financial resources to -- who are also low income. It's a 10 million dollar program. It's a super cool program because if you're DeafBlind, you can just get these super expensive pieces of equipment and you can get the training to learn how to use them. That is all over the country. We have a training administrative operation in every state and territory.
We also have less well-known areas of our rules. One that's particularly interesting is real-time text. We have a Disability Advisory Committee which a few people in the room historically have been part of. This is an advisory committee that comes to the FCC and talks about with industry and disability organizations, they talk about whatever the topic of the day is or people with disabilities. It's a cool place where the future of difficult issues can kind of be settled between consumer organizations and industry members.
We're hoping that that continues. Right now it's just kind of on hold.
And I already talked about much of this.
And now we should get into the new and cool stuff. So to kick us off with what's new and cool, Stephen is going to talk about HAC.
STEPHEN WANG: Thanks, Will.
Now we get to talk about HAC. I guess I'll try to run through this kind of quickly so that we can have a little bit of time for questions at the end of this. I know we don't have a lot of time today.
So let's get started. So what is HAC stands for hearing aid compatibility or hearing aid compatible.
And I'm not going to bore you with the history of all of that too much, but it is I think helpful to get a little background in order to appreciate what the FCC decided about all of that just this past October.
So back in 1982, Congress passed the first federal law specifically addressing communication accessibility, telecommunications for the disabled act of 1982. This law amended the Communications Act, the huge federal statute that gives the FCC its powers, to require the FCC to ensure, quote, reasonable access to telephone service by persons with impaired hearing, end quote.
The law targeted essential phones which included certain categories of wire line, rather than wireless phones. These included phones for emergency use, phones frequently needed by people with hearing loss, like at an employee's work station when needed for the employee's work duties, and coin op telephones.
So now these types of phones needed to be hearing aid compatible, or HAC.
It was groundbreaking for a law to require this, but it was also very limited. So in 1988, Congress passed the Hearing Aid Compatibility Act, which expanded the provisions in the '82 act to apply more universally.
So now the FCC needed to require that all phones, all telephones manufactured or imported into the U.S., not just essential phones, but all the phones needed to be hearing aid compatible.
This was great, but the law still did carve out an initial exception for certain types of phones. This up and coming category of phones that people can take with them on the go, you know, maybe like cell phones. So that was '88.
Now fast forward to 2003. Still no requirement for wireless phone manufacturers in this context, I'm not talking about cordless phones with a wire line base station, but wireless cell phones. So wireless phone manufacturers or service providers were not required to offer hearing aid compatible phones before 2003.
But the FCC was facing pressure from advocates and decided at that time that they would start requiring wireless phone manufacturers and service providers to offer at least some phones that are hearing aid compatible. So that was the first step in terms of wireless.
And the following years in 2008, 2010, 2012, 2016, the FCC gradually expanded the wireless HAC requirements. In 2016, the FCC set some deployment benchmarks so that by 2018, manufacturers would need to offer 66% of their wireless handset models as hearing aid compatible. And by 2021, 85%.
For nationwide service providers, they needed to offer 66% of the models as hearing aid compatible in 2019, and 85% in 2022.
Meanwhile, in 2018 at the direction of the FCC, the HAC task force was convened, composed of both industry and community members and advocates.
And they collaborated over 6 years to make recommendations on the achievability of a 100% HAC benchmark. In other words, think about how the FCC and industry can get to making all cell phones hearing aid compatible.
And that HAC task force issued their report at the end of 2022.
Now that brings us to today, or at least to this past October. So this past October the FCC adopted many of the recommendations of the task force from the reports. The FCC amended its rules to require all future wireless handset models offered for sale or use in the U.S., all, to be hearing aid compatible after a transition period.
So now all Americans will be able to choose among the same handset models available to consumers without hearing loss. So here's one of the requirements that all wireless handset models offer for sale or use will need to be hearing aid compatible. Here's when that requirement will start applying for handset manufacturers after December 14, 2026. For nationwide service providers, after June 14, 2027.
And for non-nationwide service providers, June 12, 2028. So again, after all of these transition dates, all wireless handset models offered for sale or use in the U.S. will need to be hearing aid compatible.
At the same time, the FCC made these changes, it also adopted a new definition of HAC, of hearing aid compatibility, as suggested by the HAC task force. So this new definition is broader and is not tied to one particular standard. It's more future proof, so to speak, and makes room for Bluetooth. So now hearing aid compatible means a hand set model with an internal means of compatibility, meets established technical standards for hearing aid coupling or compatibility, and is useful.
So specifically after the transition period I just mentioned, the last deadline in 2028, all 100% of wireless handset models must meet what's called the acoustic coupling requirements under the ANSI standards, and at least 85% of those models must meet the ANSI telecoil coupling requirements, and at least 15% of those models must have Bluetooth coupling technology as replacement or in addition to meeting the ANSI telecoil coupling standard.
I also want to note that there's no specific Bluetooth standard that's required to be used to meet the HAC requirement initially. Well, no specific standard to meet the HAC requirement, and that initially proprietary Bluetooth standards could be used to meet the requirement.
But after a 2-year transition period, only nonproprietary Bluetooth standards can be used to meet that requirement.
So ideally this will help promote compatibility between hearing aids using Bluetooth technology and cell phones and also promote competition in the marketplace. So while TLDR as people online might say, we now have rules in the place that say all wireless handset models offered for sale or use in the U.S. will need to be hearing aid compatible by June 2028.
And that's big. So we went from Congress saying in 1982 that only essential wire line phones needed to be accessible to all wire line phones in 1988, to gradually increasing the benchmarks for cell phones hearing aid compatibility between 2003 and 2022.
And now to 100% by 2028. That's great news for every American because even if you don't have hearing issues now, you probably will later on.
So now back to Will.
WILL SCHELL: That's true. We're all going to need that Bluetooth. Eventually they'll get us.
Let me jump into another new and cool rule that involves the FCC, and that's incarcerated TRS, or telecommunications relay service. So under the Martha Wright-Reed Act, this federal legislation aimed to make communication services for incarcerated individuals more affordable, and they threw in accessible. So if you're not aware, there's a long history of telephone companies absolutely jacking up the price of placing a phone call if you are incarcerated. So this legislation hopefully tries to contain that a little bit, but then also throws in that more modern relay services should be available to people who are incarcerated, not just old school TTY sitting in some officer's closet where you have to like ask, beg permission to go in there and make a phone call.
So those modern relay services are starting to show up in facilities. So much so that the real villain of this story is JPay. Which is the system for incarcerated people to put money in. They run the phone service as well.
They also now have these tablets available to people. You can pay to watch a movie. You can sit in your cell and watch a movie. We have rules that say, those movies have to have closed captions on them, and we've enforced that rule successfully. So please, if you, especially the P&As, if you come across people who are incarcerated who have these tablets, we want to try to make sure that VRS is available on these tablets. We want it to also make sure that captions are available on these tablets.
And we can do it. It's not easy, but we're really interested in it.
The way that this rule -- so for all the lawyers in the room, this rule for some reason, this statute added incarcerated communication services. It called it advanced communication services.
And the FCC has a series of accessibility requirements under advanced communication services. That's like text messaging and email and voiceover internet communication.
So we've now added that to our advanced -- "that" being incarcerated relay services -- to our advanced communication services list.
So that's -- I didn't read any of my notes and I have to scroll through all of my notes. That is the takeaway. If you know someone with a disability who is incarcerated who is having difficulty communicating, you should reach out to us.
Another new and cool issue.
STEPHEN WANG: Okay.
All right. So the next cool thing, Will was talking a little bit about the Disability Advisory Committee earlier, the DAC. Between 2022-2024, the FCC convened a fifth term of this DAC, and -- let's see. I don't want to talk too much about what Will had already said.
But for this particular DAC, the working groups touched on TRS, telecommunications relay service, issues, direct video calling, the use of AI to caption live video programming, audio description for video programming delivered over the internet, over IP, and my favorite, online gaming accessibility for individuals who are blind or have low vision, as some of you are familiar with.
So I had the fortune of helping Will with facilitating that last working group, which was particularly fun and interesting because even though I'm not blind, I do play video games and it was one of the first things I got to work on as a new attorney in DRO.
So the working group gave us the task of examining blind-related accessibility issues with communications on various gaming platforms. So AR and VR augmented reality, virtual reality, console, computer, handheld and smartphones, outlined the value of accessible communications of gameplay to blind users, and deploy solutions by gaming sectors and proposals to ensure development incorporates successful communications out of the box for blind gamers.
Where does this come from? You might be asking why the FCC gets to regulate video games at all. Well, the FCC isn't regulating video games per se, but the CVAA as Will alluded to requires that ACS providers, advanced communication services providers or manufacturers of equipment used for ACS ensure that those services and equipment are accessible and usable by individuals with disabilities, unless doing so is not achievable.
So as Will mentioned also, ACS includes interconnected VoIP, a non-interconnected VoIP, electronic messaging, services, and what we call interoperable videoconferencing services, in addition to the incarcerated communications that Will was also talking about.
So online multiplayer games typically have communications components that meet this definition of non-interconnected VoIP or electronic messaging, and those allow players to communicate in real time using voice or text.
So those parts of the game are ACS. It's the same thing with external third-party services. So software not built into a game that gamers might use to communicate while playing a game. Those might also be ACS. And ACS must be accessible and useful by individuals with disabilities under the CVAA.
So back in 2012, the video game industry did get a waiver from the FCC about these rules. They said they didn't have to comply with the ACS requirements for a period of time. This waiver did get extended a couple of times, but now it's no longer in effect.
So if you're playing a game with built in ACS or using a third-party ACS to communicate while you play through a raid or a dungeon with your friends and have accessibility problems with those services, complain to us, or to Will in particular.
Anyway, back to the blind gaming working group, exploring these issues for blind gamers. Ultimately the recommendations made by the group were the following: That the FCC should continue to monitor the accessibility of communications and video games; the FCC should take steps to make games and platform developers, designers, and engineers aware of their responsibility to ensure two-way communications are accessible to blind gamers; and that the FCC should consider the breadth of hardware and software barriers that blind gamers may face in accessing in-game communications.
If you want to learn more about this, you can find the working group's full report, or full recommendation, and all the other working group recommendations from the DAC at FCC.gov/dac.
And I have one more thing to add before Will jumps into videoconferencing. The ACS rules are broader than just blind gaming, as I was saying, so I wanted to throw in that we have also been working on a consumer guide about all of this that the FCC -- I'm not sure whether it's posted yet, but it should be soon if it's not up on our website yet -- that explains for consumers about our rules and video games and communications accessibility generally.
And it also provides some instructions on how to file a complaint with the FCC about it.
So back to Will.
WILL SCHELL: Yeah. Video games turn out to be so important to so many people. And especially during the pandemic. I mean, it's just where, I always say where kids are hanging out, but actually, I think it's where a lot of older people are hanging out as well.
And keep in mind, this report from the advisory committee covers -- video games is not just the giant computer video games. This also includes like Words with Friends or whatever mobile game. If you can communicate on it, it's covered.
So anyway, also part of this advanced communication services rule, way back in 2010 when the rule was passed, it included interoperable videoconferencing services. That particular interoperable videoconferencing services just kind of sat there. 2010, I know it seems like it was just yesterday, but it was 15 years ago. And 15 years ago we weren't using videoconferencing services the way that we do now.
Then the pandemic came, and it suddenly became clear how valuable these things are, and we had a rule that said that they had to be accessible.
So we had not written these regulations to clarify in what way they need to be accessible. So we did. We did it fairly recently. Again, I'm just scrolling through my notes so I don't repeat myself.
Oh, some of the things I was going to mention that I'm sure you all have experienced is beyond just work but also there's a bunch of reasons to use videoconferencing services, for like community meetings. I know I attend my town meeting. I don't go over to the town hall anymore. I just go on Zoom.
Family reunions. I went to a Zoom funeral. That was interesting.
Some of the items that are covered by there are Zoom and Teams and Meet and Apple's one.
But then there's a bunch of other ones that are included. Like Blue Jeans, which no one's ever used but you may wind up using it. You may not realize you're using it. Like also for telehealth.
Telehealth is now, they switched from telehealth being telephone consultations, now it's video consultations. Those have to be accessible to people with disabilities under our rules.
We wrote a report and order explaining in what way they have to be accessible. It was adopted, like an updated version of all of this, in September of 2024. It put into place like useful modern communication and really just hits home that it must be accessible and that we cannot leave people with disabilities behind. And Stephen and I are not going to let that happen.
JULIE KEGLEY: I have a question. So I really appreciated the captioning that I get through Teams and Zoom and all of that. And during the pandemic, I noticed that if there was a video platform that didn't have the captions, you can go to Google and you can turn on captions through Google.
And that would caption that platform. Last week I had a telehealth appointment and I don't know what platform they had. It wasn't one I had seen before. It didn't have captions. Google wouldn't caption that.
So what would you recommend that I do in that case?
WILL SCHELL: So -- well, let me come right back to that. Because we have this complaint process and I can just lay out the complaint process.
Unlike many other federal agencies, our complaint process is awesome.
And it's not only because I run it.
(Laughter)
It's because we actually have some very specific complaint rules that make the process happen. I think the biggest issue with many other federal agencies and their complaint process is that nothing really has to happen. And our complaint process, the statute says that something must happen by a certain date and then if it doesn't, then something else has to happen. So it's a pretty good law as far as filing a complaint.
There is a problem that we have. Well, there's an interesting quirk that we have, which is that we don't have a private right of action under our rules. So we come to these lawyer disability lawyering groups and we tell them, you know, it's not for you to go out and enforce our rules. You can come to us and Scout's honor; we will enforce it.
We will go out there and get it if it's covered by our rules.
The videoconferencing services, part of our order says very specifically, "captions." This is the number one accessibility thing that you can add into your videoconferencing service. If it's a -- we have already heard feedback from people using these videoconferencing services that even programs like Zoom, right, which has great captioning built into it, it's prevented from being utilized -- it's put behind -- activating the captions is put behind a host.
We haven't made any like overt decisions or published decisions about that, but I can tell you that it doesn't feel right to me to say that people accessing things even as accessible as Zoom would have to then like ask the host for permission to turn on the captions. That doesn't seem very accessible to me.
I want to make sure we don't go over.
We have as part of these ACS rules.
Again, these ACS rules incorporate voice chat, text chat, and videoconferencing services.
We have as part of that this list of performance objectives. These performance objectives are very different from most other disability rights rules. They're different because they leave a lot of room for the covered entity to figure out how to accomplish the larger goal. They're not technical in the sense of -- secretly they are written by the Access Board, these performance objectives.
And then we adopted them.
But they're not technical standards. They're not like, you know, like the rest of the Access Board stuff like 4 inches from the wall and 26 inches off the ground is where the thing has to be. This is much more broad, like the auditory information must be accessible in a visual way. The visual information has to be accessible in an auditory way.
It doesn't say blind people or Deaf people have to have access. It just says the auditory communication part of this has to be accessible in a visual way.
So they're very interesting. It leaves open room for things like, oh, now I'm in a VR headset and the way that captions work on one platform, like a static television, may not be how you want it if you're on a face computer where when you turn away, do the captions stay where you are or do they follow you around and are the captions captioning all of the content or just the content that's close by? It allows for the industry entity to work with the disability community, because that's also specified that they have to work with the disability community, to figure out how these things are going to work.
So it's a really cool set of rules that allow real life to kind of dictate how these companies make their products accessible. I'm just going to throw in that one of the performance objectives that we added for videoconferencing services is synchronous and accurate captions. Almost all of it is being done by automatic, through automated captions.
But we also require the ability to have live captioners added to the platform so that you don't have to watch captions on a separate screen or in a separate window or something like that. Because we recognize that captions for certain meetings or certain circumstances have to have a particularly high level, and sometimes people want automated captions so that they're particularly synchronous or whatever.
We've also added sign language interpretation as a performance objective for these videoconferencing services. During the pandemic we saw people who use sign language were joining Zoom meetings -- I'll just keep picking on Zoom because they're very accessible. People were joining Zoom meetings who rely on sign language interpreters and in order to have a free interpreter, they would have to call in to the Zoom meeting.
So you would -- using VRS, you would call in, because there's a phone number available to call in. So you would call your VRS company, calling into the Zoom meeting, you would have your video phone looking at your interpreter, and then you would join the Zoom meeting so that you would be a participant in the Zoom meeting.
And that's how you could -- so there would be -- we had all these VRS interpreters not able to join by video because that's not -- that wasn't part of our -- right, VRS was designed to make the telephone network accessible, not Zoom.
So anyway, we are jamming those two things together right now. We're trying to make these videoconferencing services and the video relay services kind of work together so that an interpreter could actually be on the same Zoom meeting as everyone else.
There's also blind accessibility issues we've added around the user interface for these systems so that they're screen reader accessible.
Of course the chat function built within these platforms would also need to be accessible.
And we ask a bunch of follow-up questions about adding other relay services to these Zoom meetings. I mean, if people -- like I was saying earlier, no one is placing phone calls anymore. We're all communicating by text.
And also by video. When it's a serious meeting, you get on a video.
So we're trying to bring all of these accessibility features into that modern communication platform. So we have a further notice of proposed rulemaking on that.
So very quickly, I know we're running out of time, let's talk about complaints real fast. We'll answer that question. We have complaints. And in general, if you file a complaint with us, which is just an online form, or you can call us, or you can email us and we will get your complaint in, in general we will reach out to the company and get a response from them within 30 days. That's how quickly. We want to get -- we want the companies to issue a written response to the complaint within 30 days.
If it is an issue covered by these advanced communication services rules, like Zoom, or like a telehealth issue or some sort of video platform that doesn't do captions and you can't do the work around, that video platform service under our rules is required to be accessible.
So we wouldn't be able to go after Google, whose web browser will caption virtually any content unless the platform that you're using tells Google's services not to auto caption. So my belief is that whatever videoconferencing service they were using was specifically telling Google not to caption it. And some services do that mostly stuff that is under copyright rule like videos that they don't want people to caption, like if you're watching Netflix, you can't use Google's captioning service.
So that's an example of Netflix is telling Google, you're not allowed to caption this. The video platform is probably doing the same thing. They may not know that they're doing that.
And that would just be covered by our rules.
I feel pretty confident we could get a complaint and go and have them start working on fixing that. Those advanced communication services complaints is different than regular complaints. It is a mediation process where the consumer or the organization, we get organizational plaintiffs as well. They can file a complaint regarding someone like Zoom or someone like a video game platform, saying, I tried to get on your video game and the text chat was not accessible to someone using a screen reader, or whatever the accessibility communication issue was. And what we would do is start a mediation process with the FCC being in the middle.
We would try to get what the potential solutions are from the organization or the consumer, and we would go and talk to the communication company, whether it’s a video game or something else, and we would come to some sort of a resolution.
The saddest part about this process is that we don't publicize it. The idea is that this resolution is between you and the company. So for the most part, we don't really issue a big announcement about these various companies and how they have made changes to make them accessible.
We do issue a congressional report every 2 years. I think Stephen had the pleasure of writing the congressional report last time. And we list out not specific companies but general areas where we've had these types of complaints.
Do you want to add anything more about the congressional report?
STEPHEN WANG: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just really quickly, I know we're pretty much out of time and want to make sure you guys can ask us questions if you would like.
But I just want to add that this report, so we every 2 years we're required by the CVAA to put out a biennial report. And this talks about the FCC's compliance with the CVAA state of accessibility for ACS and browsers built into mobile phones and barriers to new communications technologies.
So this past October, we released one of these reports to Congress. And this was after a cycle where we asked the public for comments on the issues and then on our tentative findings. And usually every time we do this, every 2 years we get a handful of comments from different organizations from industry and consumer advocates, but really there were only a few. So we do want to invite the public to stay tuned for the next time we have one of these reports that we're working on.
So that will be in 2026, next year, we'll be asking for comment again about people's thoughts on barriers to new communication technologies and state of accessibility and so on.
Question and Answer Session
WILL SCHELL: That's it! We don't want to hold you up from lunch. We have all of our contact information, but you can just find us, doctor rights office at FCC. We're easy to find.
But if anyone has -- I don't want to hold anyone back from lunch, but if anyone has any other questions, I think we can hang out and talk.
STEPHEN WANG: Thank you.
WILL SCHELL: Thank you all for coming. Yeah.
(Applause)
>> Can I have your contact information? Maybe I will have some questions and I will follow up. I want to keep in touch because I'm interested in some topics you mentioned.
WILL SCHELL: No problem. Here's a card in Braille if you want, if you read...
>> Oh, sure.
WILL SCHELL: And but also our email address for like, you can email us directly. But you can also email [email protected].
>> Disability Rights Office?
WILL SCHELL: Yes.
JULIE KEGLEY: One more question. If you call a company and it's an automatic AI that you're talking to, it's going to want me to answer questions yes or no or the last three digits of your social, all of that. If it's not recognizing the speaker's voice, I'm sorry, I didn't understand it, can you repeat it? So you get nowhere with the company because it's an AI and it's not picking up on like an accent or whatever.
Is that something that would fall under the FCC?
WILL SCHELL: Yeah.
And it's hard because those systems oftentimes they're not made by the company that you're calling. So if you're calling a bank, the bank doesn't make those IVR systems.
But they hire some sort of company to do it.
So if we can find out the company, so yes, it should be covered by our rules, but those can take a long time for us to try to find the right entity.
JULIE KEGLEY: Okay. Got it.
MAITREYA SHAH: Are there any conflict rules or anything like that if we talk about the ADB or anything?
WILL SCHELL: No.
>> All right. I'm in the process of they're reviewing my nomination. They're reviewing the documents right now so hopefully we'll have that in a week or two.
WILL SCHELL: We're hoping -- so right now they're doing all of the ethics review process, but we haven't been authorized to like start it up yet.
So we're doing it and we're still -- fingers crossed that we're going to start having those meetings soon. I'll look forward to seeing you there.
Those are really fun.
>> I have a question. I was wondering because I don't know if it's just like investigated by the FCC, but my friends always told me that because she is Deaf, and so some of the voice controlled AI products like Siri that provide by Apple, Alexa provide by Amazon, they're not accessible for Deaf people.
And I don't know if FCC has some regulations to investigate that?
WILL SCHELL: Those probably not directly. So there are some features in there that are accessible to people who are Deaf. So like you can type into Alexa and then it will put back out the response in text.
But that's not -- you know, that doesn't really fix the issue for people who, where it's not recognizing their voice. Our communication rules do not cover communication with computers yet. So our communication rules has to be between people.
And it also has to be in real time.
So a good example of something that's not covered is like Twitter, where you post something but you're not communicating with someone in particular. You're just saying, hey, world, this is my statement about this.
If you then direct message somebody, saying, I'm communicating with this particular person, then it is covered by our rules.
JUSTIN YOUNG: Interesting.
WILL SCHELL: So communication with robots is not covered yet. We're working on it.
>> Is there any possibility that future rules, regulations, will cover the communication between robots and human being?
WILL SCHELL: I hope so, because it's becoming -- I mean, what you were talking about with talking with the AI system, that's covered by our phone rules. The phone tree system has to be accessible.
But if you just have a speaker in your house, that's not covered by our communication rules yet. I hope so because a lot of those communications that we're having with robots now are about accessing the internet and they are about communicating with other people in a way. I don't know. I really hope. So but I think it's going to take an act of Congress.
I don't think that, if we interpreted it to be included, I don't think it would survive a challenge.
>> Thank you. Thank you for your wonderful presentation.
>> Also, I still have a question. I'm blind and I love games. As far as so far most games that I play are audio games. And for me, as far as I know, most video games are not accessible for screen readers like me.
So yeah, you mentioned that your rules also cover video games. And as far as you know, is there any, I mean now, is there already any video game accessible for screen readers? Just some of my friends told me about one, but just one.
WILL SCHELL: The Last of Us is a big budget video game that got a lot of attention for being so accessible. But I think that attention is good. You know, platforms, video games, the platforms themselves generally have accessibility, so PlayStation and Xbox, those have screen readers built in for the menus. Once you activate the game itself, it gets dicey.
Our rules would require that any of those video games that have communication in the game, that everything up to, so you can actually turn it on and get to the point where you're actually communicating, all of that would have to be accessible. And usually when we point that out, and the company makes the process to make the communication accessible, it makes at least the menus and activation stuff accessible.
But the actual gameplay itself, not covered by our rules in any way.
>> Oh, got it. So you only cover the communication part.
WILL SCHELL: Yeah, that's right. Part of the problem with companies like PlayStation is that the communication, even for the games, is really through the PlayStation platform. So if you're playing a game that has communication built into it, if you're playing it on play statement, you still go through the communication part through the PlayStation console. So that is already accessible.
But most people just go to Discord. So anyway, our involvement really ends once the communication is accessible.
But you should check out this blind gaming guy.
STEPHEN WANG: Sightless Combat? Just from the U.K.
WILL SCHELL: Yeah. He's totally blind and demos games that are accessible.
STEPHEN WANG: That's right. He streams on Twitch.
JUSTIN YOUNG: Ben.
WILL SCHELL: Ben Breen.
STEPHEN WANG: Great to meet you all.