Sonny James has received an e-mail response to his plea for captions on the movie trailers at Mac.com. According to the e-mail, the company would like to offer captions online..but lacks the ability to do so.

On Sunday, March 26, 2006, the Seattle Times reported on problems at the Court Reporting Institute of North Seattle. According to this article, too few students graduated, deceptive practices were used, and students did not learn enough and wound up heavily in debt.

Kudos to Image Logic for the decision to actually GIVE AWAY its most basic software so that small broadcasters currently bombarding the Federal Communications Commission with pleas for waivers, will no longer have an excuse for not captioning! They even set up a separate website just for downloading this basic software - www.freerollup.com.

Every week it seems, there is news of new internet television equipment or broadcasting. Most recent:

AOL Launches Free Vintage TV - NY Times, March 24, 2006

Download to Own - While this is being launched in the U.K., how long before it arrives in the USA? Probably not long! - CNN.com, March 23, 2006

I think I also saw one article about a new device in Korea for watching television on a handheld.

"Hat Tip" to Sonny James for bringing this new blog to our attention. Bradley Porsche shares a letter he wrote to the Federal Communications Commission asking for legislation to require captioning on digital media. It is an excellent letter. Unfortunately, it does not acknowledge the fact that the FCC can not make the law - only Congress can, while FCC writes the regulations interpreting the law.

If Joe Clark were a newspaper reporter, I would say he had a scoop with his latest blog posting, "Gutted." Even I didn't know that the WGBH Caption Center had laid off most of their people. In this blog posting, Clark discusses the layoffs at both WGBH and NCI, and the growth of outsourcing - to foreign countries - of captioning.

Maybe! Jeff Rosen reports in "Ready for Takeoff?" that the deaf community has a chance to file comments in a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking that would require, among other things, captions on entertainment videos.

Bob Sullivan of MSNBC.com has written on the issue of internet captions in his blog posting, "Net Video Leaves the Deaf Behind." At the time I read it, it already had 37 comments.