Several airlines including Delta are leading the charge to bring accessible IFE to passengers — of their own volition. Outside of industry’s voluntary efforts, however, U.S. regulations governing adoption have largely languished. But why?
In 2016, after industry and disability advocates convened as part of the U.S. Department of Transportation’s so-called ACCESS Advisory Committee, a rare agreement between both sides led to proposed regulations governing accessible IFE. But the regs were tabled in 2017 without being enacted because of the policies of the incoming Trump Administration, and have since effectively stagnated.
It seems that when it comes to accessible IFE, we’ve taken two steps forward with a laudable consensus only to take one step back with inaction due to congressional gridlock.
The Airline Passenger Experience Association (APEX), which represents airlines, airports, suppliers, content creators and other industry stakeholders, participated in the DOT’s negotiated-rulemaking process eight years ago. As the association prepares for its annual APEX/IFSA Global EXPO later this month, Runway Girl Network reached out to APEX Technology Committee Chair-Emeritus Michael Childers for an update.
Childers represented the association on the ACCESS Advisory Committee and today is working closely with APEX Technology Committee Chair Jonas von Krüchten to advance the important work of ensuring IFE content is accessible.
RGN: Michael, obviously the accessibility community is eager to see movement on accessible IFE, both from a standpoint of captioning, but also for those who are impaired in other ways. Where does everything stand in that regard? There’s still a lot of content that is not captioned.
Michael Childers: Going back to 2016 — when I represented APEX on the U.S. Department of Transportation’s (DOT) ACCESS Advisory Committee —my APEX Working Group came up with good solutions for the provision of dynamic closed captions for the deaf and audio descriptions for the blind that the industry and the advocacy community were both very happy with. Those solutions were in the form of APEX delivery specifications for dynamic closed captions and audio descriptions for cached content, along with an implementation schedule that did not require aircraft retrofits.
Unfortunately, shortly after that agreement was reached (in October 2016) a new government administration came to Washington with a ‘no new rules’ policy or a policy of ‘if you put in a new rule, you have to get rid of five old ones.’ And so, all the work that we had done up to that point — coming up with a solution that was accessible to everybody — the solution was there, but there was no regulation that enforced it; therefore the adoption in many areas was slow.
Now you do have some airlines like Delta for example, who prioritized it, and they sort of lead the industry with it right now. Some, like Virgin Atlantic, are committing to it. Virgin Australia has been a leader. And, of course, Air Canada.
You have others that maybe haven’t been quite as quick to implement closed captions and audio descriptions before adoption of a regulation, but the solution is out there. The solution still works. For nearly all of the content available to IFE, closed captions exist. For perhaps 70 to 80 percent of that content, audio descriptions exist.
For dynamic closed captions the APEX specification calls for IMSC (Internet Media Subtitles & Captions), a specification adopted by W3C. Audio descriptions for the blind or persons of low vision can be provided in the same format as audio language tracks, so we needed no new technology for that, just to call it out in a specification.
The 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act (CVAA), passed by the U.S. Congress in 2010, requires all content that is distributed via IPTV (Internet Protocol Television) networks to be closed captioned. CVAA empowers the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to enforce that requirement on all IPTV networks, and the FCC has confirmed that they view IFE systems as IPTV networks.
After meeting with the FCC, however, they informally agreed to enforce CVAA on airlines via the DOT and not directly.
Therefore, nearly all content created today is required under CVAA to be closed captioned, and airlines are covered by this law. Airlines and CSPs who license for inflight exhibition should require the content provider to provide dynamic closed captions meeting our specification as content providers licensing content to IFE are required to create and provide them.
Now, what we have going on today is there are two bills in Congress impacting IFE that were introduced, I think both about mid-2023. One of them updates the 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act (CVAA) of 2010. That new bill is called the Communications and Video Technology Act (CVTA), which says basically let’s take the act that we had back in 2010, let’s look at the technology and let’s update it, but with the same objectives in mind.
There is a companion bill which says that Congress will require DOT to create specifications and regulations for IFE accessibility and enforce them. If the same party that was elected in 2016 is elected in 2024, no new regulations are likely to come from DOT. Both of these bills are being tracked for us by [APEX association management company] Kellen’s legal team in Washington D.C.
What I am hopeful of is that these bills are introduced, then passed and that DOT takes the agreement that we had back in 2016 and says that it works and therefore this is now our regulation — with minor tweaks. It was agreed upon between advocacy and the airline community back then. It still applies. So let’s enforce it.
So that’s what I’m hopeful of happening. That agreement codified several principles that are good for airlines as well as disabled passengers, and we all benefit by preserving those principles.
The one thing that we did not finish in 2016 was an accessible user interface for the blind for IFE systems. We did create, at the request of the DOT, a Working Group at APEX and we were able to accomplish creation of a description of guidelines for system developers for UI. We fell short of the full specification; we ended up just with the guidelines.
We have now created a new Working Group which is now organizing under chairs Ian Walberg and Louis Poupard, with the objective of finally coming up with a specification for user interface.
I am hopeful of involving the American Council of the Blind, who joined us and was very helpful back in 2016, as part of that Working Group so that when the legislation does eventually clear Congress or when the gridlock clears Congress that we will have a complete solution between what we agreed on in 2016 and what we can accomplish now with respect to a user interface that actually does the job for everyone.
RGN: Are we impacted by regulations outside the U.S.?
Michael Childers: The U.S. DOT has jurisdiction over all aircraft flying in and out of the U.S., as does the FCC when it comes to accessible content. And Canadian accessibility law is perhaps the strongest.
But we should also be mindful of the European Accessibility Act, which is a directive of the EU that took effect in 2019 with the objective of improving trade between members of the EU for accessibility products and services by removing country-specific rules.
That EU directive was also built to complement the EU’s Web Accessibility Directive and to reflect the UN’s Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities that covers a wide range of personal devices such as smartphones, e-books, and TVs, as well as public transport services.
The European Union’s Web Accessibility Directive (Directive [EU] 2016/2102] which became fully effective in June 2017 mandates that public sector websites and apps meet specific accessibility standards including those developed by W3C’s Web Accessibility Initiative. Our APEX closed caption specification is built on W3C’s IMSC standard.
And the European Accessibility Act of 2025 is intended to enhance digital accessibility including integrating technologies like AI and voice recognition.
The potential of all of these to impact IFE needs to be determined.
RGN: Percentage wise, in terms of content that would be captioned per the recommendations agreed by the ACCESS Advisory Committee, that would take us to at least 50% of all content being captioned, yes?
Michael Childers: More than 90 percent of the global commercial aviation fleet utilize MPEG-4 or better systems and can support dynamic closed captions. The rest — those with MPEG-1/2 systems — can still support bitmap. Content providers licensing to aircraft flying in and out of the U.S. are required by CVAA to provide closed captions on all of the content they license. About 70 to 80 percent of content available to IFE has audio descriptions — it’s just that not all content is suitable for audio descriptions. So the system capabilities and the availability of captions and descriptions exist. It is possible to provide 100% dynamic closed captioning on more than 90 percent of the aircraft flying.
There are airlines out there that are flying today who actually have 100% closed captioning on their movies, 100% closed captions on their cached television content, and once they deal with a player issue in the hardware which should be taken care of fairly quickly, 100% captioning on live TV content inflight. There is at least one very large airline out there right now, which is effectively at 100%. Dynamic closed captions are only possible on aircraft whose systems are MPEG-4 and newer. MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 systems are not technologically able to support dynamic captions, but they can support bitmap, i.e., pictures of captions whose color and font is not subject to user control. Implementing bitmap entails loading two copies of every unit of content— one with captions and one without.
There are several hundred aircraft out there that still have MPEG-1/2 systems.
RGN: So, in some ways because of the regulatory holdups, industry has innovated in the meantime?
Michael Childers: Yes, for the most part the industry said, ‘Okay, we came up with a good solution in 2016. It was agreeable to all parties, so it is in our interests to implement.’ Some are faster than others, and that’s sort of a matter of prioritization. One of the reasons I’m hopeful that the legislation in fact passes is that that will help to change the priorities so that that gets on a faster track than those that maybe, said, ‘well, the law isn’t there yet so maybe that’s not our priority this year.’ I’m anxious to see it becoming a priority for everybody.
RGN: Safran Passenger Innovations recently released a very standard GUI for accessible IFE (and later Thales). Are you seeing anything akin to that which could be simply adopted and ingested into what APEX is doing and saying, ‘Okay, we’ve decided that this is the basis for a baseline accessible GUI?’
Michael Childers: Safran’s Louis Poupard will be a co-chair of the new Working Group. So, we will leverage what they’ve done, and they are willing to share. Now, one of the things that Tony Stephens of The American Council of the Blind told us back in 2016/2017 is that he believes that the best solutions will be found in leveraging consumer technology.
So basically, Tony said doing it on your own systems is hard. Doing it on the passenger’s own device is easier because, for the most part, and this was true back in 2016/2017, a lot of the accessibility features were there and that has improved since that time. So, one of the things that I’m hopeful that the Working Group will look at closely is whether we can adapt some of that consumer technology. It will be interesting to look more deeply at what Safran is doing. It will be interesting to see what The American Council of the Blind recommends now, a few years later, but we may find that there is a way to leverage that consumer technology.
RGN: I just wanted to shift gears very quickly before I let you go. The Apple Vision Pro is interesting piece of technology and APEX/IFSA CEO Dr. Joe Leader has been posting some fascinating pictures on LinkedIn of using it onboard aircraft. I also got the chance to explore the tech at Safran Passenger Innovations’ stand at this year’s Aircraft Interiors Expo. Are there applications that might be able to be used either for accessibility or inflight entertainment that you are seeing or exploring, and will APEX play a role in that as that technology comes to bear?
Michael Childers: There is a good possibility APEX will play there. During the last few years with all the constraints of the pandemic etc, we had to limit what we were doing, Working Group wise, industry wise, and association wise. Now that we are in a better environment, we’re looking closely at what additional working groups that we need to deploy. Two are launching currently; one of them is the Smart Metadata Working Group and the other one is this Accessible user Interface Working Group. There are a number of others that we are looking at to see whether certain issues, certain things can be accomplished by way of a Working Group, and I would expect during the next year or so to see another two or three working. One possibility is a 4K Working Group. Another is an edge caching working group.
RGN: It does feel like that there’s kind of fresh post-pandemic momentum now behind the association’s technology work.
Michael Childers: And the APEX TECH conference is an example of that. There were 210 chairs in the room for last February’s TECH And we had record attendance.
Related Articles:
- FlightPath3D embraces inclusivity with new Accessibility Map for IFE
- Safran Passenger Innovations offers IFE Accessible Mode for free
- Accessibility improvements proposed by Delta, Collins and Boeing
- Op-Ed: Why “reg-neg” pact on accessible IFE should be preserved
- Op-Ed: Standards should shape the future of accessible IFE
Featured image credited to Jason Rabinowitz
