Legal requirements for accessibility

[chrisn]

Feedback from the Accessible Platform Architectures (APA) Working Group at https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-tvcontrol/2017Mar/0043.html:

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in the U.S. has explicit legally mandated regulations setting forth some strict requirements on how certain alternative media are to be exposed to consumers. These regulations also require accessible program guides.

We believe that developers should be flagged most especially on the requirement that captioning must be enableable by top level controls. These FCC requirements implement provisions of a U.S. law known as the "Twenty-First Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act" as explained by the FCC at:

https://www.fcc.gov/general/twenty-first-century-communications-and-video-accessibility-act-0#block-menu-block-4

The FCC's regulations pertinent to this specification were published in December 2016 in the document: "Accessibility Requirements for Television and Set-Top Box Controls, Menus, and Program Guides" available at:

PDF: https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/DA-16-1416A1.pdf
MS-Word: https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/DA-16-1416A1.docx

Also relevant is the document "Display of Captioning on Equipment Used to View Video Programming" available at:

https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/closed-captioning-display-requirements-equipment#block-menu-block-4