Well, if we turned the sound off and turned on the closed captioning, that should help with the ADHD.

On the other hand, smashing them sounds like a whole lot more fun. Good exercise even.

Smashing it is.

And, of course, this will mean that there will be LESS public TVs turned on. It will be cheaper to turn them off than comply in many cases.

The article doesn't mention it; but, is there an exception made for retailers selling TVs? Or will they be forced to pay a fine for everyone of their TVs turned on, but, not showing closed captioning? I can just see some ticker giver going bat-shit crazy with a wall of TVs.

Lastly, has that city council ever read closed captioning? A lot of times it is a joke - with all the misspellings, misused homonyms, etc.

But what if the sound is off anyway, and the bar is playing music? That's how the big sports bars that have multiple events airing at once do it.

I'd turn on the CC if it were my place, but I certainly don't think there should be a law about it. This is just a BS excuse for people to harass businesses. I'm sure it's easy to comply, but it's also easy to forget.

It's all about those juicy licence fees.

You want to have a TV on your business? There's a license fee for that.
Is the sound on? You have to pay for that too.
Are using closed-captioning? Oooh yes, another licence fee.

Is the closed captioning going to be exclusively in English? Portland is a progressive multi-ethnic city. How is it fair for deaf Hmong(to pick just one of the myriad of ethnic Portlandians) to be bombarded with text he cannot comprehend? In fact it seems downright cruel. I hope Portland amends the law to mandate multiple closed captioning feeds on every public television. A wall of text is small price to pay for fairness.

The bar I go to when I want to drink, or watch sports and drink with other like minded people have TVs with the CC on.

The default location is in the middle of the fucking screen. Location seems to be settable by the broadcaster, and some put them to the bottom or top. But that's doesn't include any of the ESPN family line, so...

With crawls on the bottom, and other useful information at the top, something useful is being covered up. Generally, once you've ordered something, the request goes "hey, can you turn off the CC?"

These LG tv's BTW.

I got curious to see of one could specify the CC position, and at least in the model I looked at that wasn't available.

However, things like font size and color, and background color were available. Will the City of Portland now specify those things? perhaps they can enbiggen the letters so much that they cover the screen?

Yes, yes, I could see them doing that.

Now, as far as the Hmong go, there are three dialects, so which one do you choose?

Since Portland is likely to impose $15 per hour minimum wage there probably won't be many sport bars left anyway.

Can't wait to see what happens to gas prices. No self serve gas in Oregon.

And the visually impaired? I have seen videos that have a second sound track that describes the scene. Shouldn't the businesses also be forced to offer that? Why does this law accommodate only the deaf?... And as pointed out above, English speaking?

"It benefits everyone" I always hate that phrase since it takes me 5 seconds to come up with people who it would harm. Personally not a big sports dan but on the bottom of the screen don't they put the info like quarter , scores, time left which would be lost if cc is used.

Fight back. Control your environment with technology!

http://www.amazon.com/TV-B-Gone-Universal-Remote-Control-Keychain/dp/B0006GD9CE

This is such complete and utter bullshit. Most good sports bars, if you ask, will turn on cc if you want it, especially since most of the time three or four different games are on and the sound system is playing music anyway.

There is no need for a law for this.

I have a remote control app on my phone, everything from satalite, to VCRs, to fans.

Anything with a IR remote can be yours for less than $5 dollars

Can ANYONE hear the TV in a noisy bar? Seems like it is already equal opportunity.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.remotefairy&hl=en

Looks like they raised the price slightly

"However, things like font size and color, and background color were available. Will the City of Portland now specify those things? "

It's worse than that. As activists press harder, the city will eventually adopt regulations requiring that the captioning be displayed in a manner that standard television built-in closed captioning doesn't support. The bar owners will have to go buy special caption decoders, which will doubtless be very expensive. I could also see an equal-opportunity stink being raised about things like picking up the radio broadcast and using that as the audio, instead of the TV commentary. (This is a standard capability on mlb.tv, to name one.) After all, if the closed captioning doesn't match the audio, that's hardly fair, is it?

There's also the matter that closed-captioning of live broadcasts... well, they suck. The technology isn't there yet. Unlike a taped broadcast, you can't have someone type it all up in advance, checking to make sure the words are all correct and names are spelled properly and the captioning lip-syncs reasonably well and so forth. For a live broadcast, you have to use a speech-to-text converter. Most of them don't work very well on live sports broadcasts, where announcers may be speaking quickly or in an excited voice, in a noisy environment. They miss a lot of words; they're very slow sometimes (I've seen up to 30 seconds behind the action), they struggle with names and jargon words, and so forth. The quality ranges from mediocre to unreadable.