BROADCASTERS’ EMERGENCY REPORTS CALLED MORE EFFECTIVE THAN EAS

National broadcasters are more effective in communicating a national emergency to the disabled than the FCC-administered emergency alert system (EAS), said Susan Fox, Disney vp-govt. affairs. “EAS -- the sense that I got from the folks in my own company -- is not the answer,” Fox said during a panel here on defining emergency at FCC’s Emergency Communications and Homeland Security: Working With the Disability Community Summit. “I think what we do, the information that we provide, is greater and broader than EAS,” she said.

Panel moderator Linda Blair, FCC deputy chief- Enforcement Bureau, said the system, created in 1951, wasn’t activated during the Sept. 11 attacks: “In fact, it has never been activated.”

EAS could be used as a tool along with other communication technology and other protocols, suggested Elizabeth Davis, dir., emergency preparedness initiative, National Organization on Disabilities: “I don’t think EAS should be thrown out. I think it could be improved and we need to look into that.” The FCC issued a rulemaking that would revise rules governing EAS to allow wireless cable TV systems to provide EAS alerts to their subscribers in a “more efficient and less burdensome manner” (CD March 15 p16). However, wireless executives expressed concern that broader EAS requirements would be technically difficult to fulfill.

Alan Dinsmore, senior govt. relations representative for American Foundation for the Blind, urged the FCC to initiate a proceeding to address issues related to providing the disability community with access to emergency information over different communications platforms. “Many of the assumptions that we have, particularly about what emergency alert systems… are all about, need to be very closely looked at,” he said: “The nature, [requirements and capabilities] of the emergency broadcast system [are] not what [they] used to be. So, I think [we need to] bring ourselves together to begin a dialog… and hopefully press the FCC to actually publish a notice indicating that they might be willing to do a proceeding with respect to emergency broadcast.”

Dinsmore urged the Commission and the disability community to consider a “national approach” to addressing the emergency communications issues. He said one of the “great concerns of broadcasters” that he agreed with was “determining the authenticity of what is an emergency and how that gets past through the system. So, it can’t be a local- state issue; it crosses the lines, and can potentially cross the lines with disastrous circumstances.” Dinsmore urged the Commission and the disability community to come up with “a better set of standards for everyone involved… to understand what emergencies are about and then to have access to the technology. The basis for that access already exists.”

Davis cautioned broadcasters about “over saturation of information” that could be confusing to a disabled person. In the coverage on Sept. 11, for example, broadcasters used screen crawls and multiple screen shots. “It was difficult to discern what was critical emergency information and what was newsworthy emergency information,” Davis said.

To improve emergency information to the disabled, Davis suggested broadcasters use a common vocabulary to help viewers absorb the information, assess their own danger and act accordingly. Broadcasters tend to use different terms that could be interpreted differently at a time of crisis, she said. She also questioned why broadcasters aren’t considering the whole spectrum of disability, from the hearing to the visually impaired.

Andrew Imparato, pres. of the American Assn. of People with Disabilities said those with intellectual disabilities or brain injuries could have problems reading text or understanding signs. He suggested considering “emergency” sign language “that is easy for people with disabilities to understand. If the FCC and other entities pay attention to these issues, you'll do your job better for the whole population. Signage that works for people with intellectual disabilities is signage that works for everyone.” Imparato also stressed there was a “need to practice using these emergency systems, so that people get comfortable with them.”

A blind woman in the audience asked Fox about not mentioning any initiatives at Disney’s owned ABC stations and networks about oral alerts. ABC does have audio tone alerts in place, Fox said. “There has been talks about whether to use a telephone ring, something that clearly stands out from background noise,” Fox said. Fox explained that closed captions for the hearing impaired “got to the cue first.” “I know our folks on the station and network level are making sure that information we present is audible,” Fox said. ABC’s local stations often break into programming to alert the audience about a special report both visually and orally. “In fact, we have been discussing how useful is the tone if we break into programming anyway,” she said.

But not every disabled person is going to have a TV or radio on, said Jenny Hansen, mgr., public safety services office, Mont. Dept. of Administration. Mont. is testing an emergency call-out service where a person can be notified of an emergency through their home phone.

Dinsmore said ensuring that emergency communications was available “across multiple platforms” was “the thing to be under discussion first.” For example, he said during Sept. 11, people immediately turned to their cellphones: “If you had a cellphone, you were in a fair shape… If you were blind or visually impaired, 6 years after the implementation of regulations, we still don’t really have accessible cellphone.” Dinsmore suggested: “What we need to do is to use this particular set of circumstances to kick start better emergency communication information through some FCC regulation.”

Dinsmore expressed concern there was “very little accessible information” available to persons with disabilities about “what to do” after an emergency occurs: “That’s one of the things… which I think deserves a lot more serious consideration by the FCC.” Cheryl Heppner, exec. dir. of Northern Va. Resource Center for Deaf & Hard of Hearing Persons, said the information was often not available on the first place. “There are gaps in the way people have been getting information,” she said. Heppner said there was “technology available that would fill that gap, but it’s not yet developed to the point that we are ready to put it.” For example, she suggested, there could be displays put on the roads with flashing lights to alert that there was important information available. She noted, however: “Whatever solution we come up with, it needs to have flexibility for alternative formats -- there are people who need to have information displayed in different ways.”

Dinsmore said the Internet could be a good way to address the problem of providing access to emergency information for people with disabilities: “It’s an example of where we have something in place that can be used.” Heppner also said it was “very important” that while “we still have problems regarding existing technology,” such as analog TV, “with upcoming technologies [such as DTV], we want to be sure that there is an early consideration of captioning technologies.”

Powell Says Disabled Community Won’t Be ‘Left Behind’

“The disability community cannot and will not be left behind as the Commission works to implement homeland security measures,” FCC Chmn. Powell said at the end of the daylong FCC summit. Powell ticked off a list of homeland security measures the FCC has undertaken in the past several years, including the creation of a federal advisory committee dedicated to media reliability issues. Such efforts “are intended to aid and protect all Americans,” Powell said. The summit was designed to “reinforce this commitment” to ensure disability access as part of such measures. Powell cited Dept. of Commerce statistics that one in 5 Americans is disabled and one in 10 is severely disabled. These data underscore the need for the FCC, the communications industry and the disability community to work together to ensure access to communications in an emergency, Powell said.

Through requirements for 3-digit, 711 dialing for all Telecom Relay Services and the transmission of E911 over TTY, the FCC is “readily addressing the needs of the disability community,” Powell said: “We acknowledge and embrace that there is much, much more work that needs to be done.” Among areas that require more work, he cited a need for broadcast outlets and multi-video distributors to provide closed captioning for emergency situations. Powell also cited a need for service providers and equipment manufacturers to “continue to work on disability access.” He called the meeting Thurs. “an historic opportunity to listen and learn about the issues facing the disability community, the communications industry and federal regulators with regard to emergency communications.”

Technology developments appear to be moving closer to an automatic speech recognition system for closed captioning, which has been an elusive goal for years, said Larry Goldberg, dir.-media access for Boston public broadcasting station WGBH. In an afternoon panel on technology developments, he stressed the need for accuracy when doing closed captioning to communicate emergency information. “Ninety-nine percent accuracy or better is what is required,” he said. The reliability of automatic speech recognition for closed captioning hasn’t advanced enough for emergency communications, he said: “You really need human intervention for the foreseeable future.”

One issue that came up during the afternoon panel is that more TV programming is being rebroadcast on websites, but not always with closed captioning. “Some of it is being rebroadcast directly from the air without closed captioning,” Goldberg said: “That is a real shame because it takes very little to bring that to the Web. All of them can -- and some do -- stream their captions for the website,” he said of broadcasters.