August 8th is the deadline to submit comments to the Department of Justice (DOJ) Supplemental Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (SANPRM) titled Nondiscrimination on the Basis of Disability; Accessibility of Web Information and Services of State and Local Government Entities. In other words, the DOJ is looking for comments on the regulation implementing title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) that applies to accessibility of State and local government entities on the web.
On June 29th, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) announced the reaching of settlements with 11 education organizations to ensure website accessibility for people with disabilities.
On April 4th, Facebook launched their new object recognition technology that provides a description of pictures posted on their platform. They call this technology “automatic alternative text.”
As a part of the incremental enforcement of captioning of internet video programming, a new deadline arrives on March 30, 2016. Distributors of video programming that they have uploaded to the Internet and is later shown on TV with captions, will have 15 days, after the date the programming is first shown on TV with captions, to add captions to it.
Last August, Netflix released their original series “Narcos” which offers audio description and closed caption in Spanish and English. This is the first of their original productions to have Spanish audio description.
