If you make, distribute or publish video online, a two-year-old countdown just quietly hit zero. On August 17, 2026, the compliance deadline passed for the FCC’s rule requiring TVs, streaming devices and apps to make closed captioning display settings “readily accessible” to viewers. It’s a good moment to revisit FCC closed captioning standards more broadly, because online video accessibility in 2026 looks meaningfully different than it did even a few years ago.
Video consumption keeps shifting toward YouTube, connected TV apps, social platforms and live streaming, and the audience watching has never been more diverse: viewers who are Deaf or have hearing loss, viewers who are blind or have low vision, people watching on mute in public spaces, and non-native English speakers all rely on captions and audio description to follow along. The 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act (CVAA) is the law behind most of this, and the FCC has been actively updating how it applies that law to modern video delivery.
Understanding the CVAA: The 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act Explained
CVAA compliance starts with a simple principle: if video programming aired on TV with captions, the same programming generally has to carry captions when it’s later delivered over the internet, including on-demand clips and full episodes. The law extended decades-old broadcast captioning obligations into the internet age, and the FCC’s quality standards for those captions, adopted in 2014, are still the foundation of what compliance means today:
- Accuracy — captions must match the spoken dialogue, including song lyrics, with correct spelling and grammar.
- Synchronicity — captions must coincide with the corresponding audio to the greatest extent possible.
- Completeness — captions must run from the start of a program to the end, without dropping out mid-show.
- Placement — captions can’t obscure faces, on-screen text, graphics or credits.
None of that is new, but it’s worth restating because it’s still the rubric regulators, distributors and viewers use to judge caption quality, whether the captions were generated by AI, produced by a human captioner, or some blend of both. A human QC layer on top of automated captioning, like the one built into Verbit’s Captivate Post Plus, is one of the more common ways distribution teams keep accuracy and placement consistent across a full episodic slate or live event.
FCC Closed Captioning Display Settings: What You Need to Know Now
The headline update, and the actual news here, is the closed captioning display settings order the FCC adopted in July 2024, which gave manufacturers and multichannel video programming distributors (MVPDs) a two-year runway that just ran out.
We covered this news when the FCC’s Media Bureau set the exact compliance date, and the rule requires covered devices and services to make caption customization options genuinely usable, judged against four factors: proximity (settings reachable without digging through menus), discoverability (clearly labeled and documented), previewability (users can see changes before applying them), and consistency and persistence (preferences carry over across apps and sessions). Legal teams tracking the rollout, including Davis Wright Tremaine’s compliance analysis and a JD Supra regulatory alert, have flagged it as one of the more concrete accessibility mandates the FCC has issued in years.
That runway existed because advocacy groups had spent years telling the FCC how hard it can be to even locate caption settings on a modern device, a point FCC Commissioner Geoffrey Starks raised directly when the order was adopted. Now that August 17, 2026 has come and gone, this isn’t a soft deadline: viewers who run into inaccessible caption controls can already file an accessibility complaint directly with the FCC, which makes this a live compliance risk rather than a box to check retroactively.
The obligation technically sits with hardware and platform makers, not content owners. But it’s a good prompt for any media company to check that the closed caption screens on the platforms and apps it publishes to actually support font, color, background and positioning customization, since viewers will increasingly expect it and complain when it’s missing. It’s also a reminder that “real-time” captioning quality is about more than speed. As Verbit’s engineering team recently discussed, the systems behind accurate, well-synchronized captions are doing a lot of work behind the scenes, and treating latency as the only metric that matters misses the point.
What Is Audio Description and Why It Matters – Especially Now
Online video accessibility isn’t only about captions. Audio description inserts narrated descriptions of key visual elements for viewers who are blind or have low vision, whether that narration comes from a professional audio describer or an AI-assisted, computer-vision-driven pipeline. The FCC has been steadily expanding its audio description mandate into more television markets each year. 10 more designated market areas came under the requirement in January 2025, and per Wiley’s regulatory alert, the FCC has since moved to extend the mandate further, with additional markets added on a rolling basis. Network-affiliated stations in covered markets must provide 50 hours of audio-described programming per quarter during prime time or children’s programming, plus 37.5 additional hours.
For content teams, the practical takeaway is that captioning and audio description increasingly need to be planned together rather than bolted on separately. Verbit’s overview of descriptive narration and audio description breaks down the standard, extended and AI-generated approaches, and how each fits different production timelines. Verbit’s media production and media live solutions both build audio description into the same workflow as captioning and transcription, so it isn’t a separate vendor relationship to manage on top of everything else.
How to Achieve ADA Compliant Video for Enhanced Accessibility
FCC captioning and audio description rules don’t exist in isolation. The Department of Justice’s 2024 update to ADA Title II requires state and local government entities, including public colleges and universities, to meet WCAG 2.1 Level AA for their digital content, with compliance deadlines of April 2026 for larger entities and April 2027 for smaller ones. In practice, ADA compliant video generally means accurate synchronized captions, full transcripts and audio description working together, not any single element on its own.
Title II technically applies to government entities rather than media companies, but the overlap with FCC standards is closer than it looks. Broadcasters, streaming platforms and production studios routinely create or distribute video on behalf of public universities, city governments and school districts, so the same caption files and audio description tracks often need to satisfy both regulators at once. Courts have also been extending similar accessibility expectations to private businesses under ADA Title III, so the direction of travel points toward one shared accessibility bar for online video, not separate FCC and ADA standards
Verbit’s guides to video accessibility under ADA Title II and its accessibility for people with hearing loss both cover how these overlapping obligations play out in practice. A university streaming a lecture, a city government posting a council meeting, and a broadcaster airing a news clip online are all, in different ways, answering to the same underlying question: can everyone actually access this content.
Don't Forget the Global Audience – Considering Localization As Well
Once a caption file exists, extending it to serve non-English-speaking audiences is a smaller lift than starting from scratch, and it can meaningfully grow a video’s reach. Localized subtitles, Verbit Dub, and multilingual transcripts turn a single piece of accessible content into one that works across markets, not just across abilities.
Building Compliance Into the Workflow with an Effective Media Accessibility Partner
The organizations that handle this well tend to treat captioning, transcription, and audio description as one integrated production step rather than three separate compliance checkboxes. That’s the logic behind pairing media captioning and media transcription services with the same AI-plus-human-review model, so accuracy, synchronicity, completeness and placement are handled consistently whether the content is a live broadcast or a post-production release.
Verbit has spent more than 35 years in this specific corner of media, captioning and transcribing content for national TV networks, cable news and some of the largest live broadcasts in the world, including the Olympics, the World Cup and the Super Bowl. Those are exactly the kinds of high-stakes, high-visibility broadcasts where FCC accuracy, synchronicity and completeness standards get the most scrutiny, and where a missed deadline or a garbled caption feed becomes a headline of its own. That history is also why Verbit tracks FCC rulemakings, like the caption display settings order that just took effect, as a matter of course rather than a scramble.
Broadcasters and MVPDs need partners who are already fluent in what’s changing before a deadline lands, not after. FCC standards for online video have quietly gotten more specific, and 2026 marked one of the more consequential enforcement dates in years. That’s unlikely to be the last update, and as AI systems take on more of the captioning and description workload, expect regulators to keep refining what “accessible” actually means in practice, not just on paper.
Demo Verbit’s FCC-Ready Captioning and Audio Description in Action
Meeting FCC standards while keeping pace with production schedules gets a lot easier when compliance is built into the workflow rather than added at the end. Book a demo to see how Verbit’s media captioning, transcription and audio description solutions, including Captivate Post Plus, handle accuracy, synchronicity, completeness and placement at the scale of a national network or a single in-house production team.
Frequently Asked Questions About FCC Closed Captioning
What is closed captioning?
Closed captioning is on-screen text that displays the spoken dialogue, sound effects and other audio elements of a video, timed to match the audio. Unlike open captions, closed captions can be turned on or off by the viewer, and they’re primarily designed to make audio content accessible to viewers who are Deaf or have hearing loss, though many people use them in sound-off environments too. The FCC’s consumer guide to internet video captioning covers how the requirement applies online.
Are subtitles required by law?
In the U.S., captioning (not subtitles in the translation sense) is legally required in specific circumstances rather than universally. The CVAA requires captions on internet-delivered video that previously aired on TV with captions, the FCC requires captioning on most broadcast and cable programming, and the ADA increasingly requires captioned video from public entities and, in many court interpretations, from businesses open to the public. Purely original online video with no prior TV broadcast isn’t automatically covered by the CVAA, though ADA and state-level obligations can still apply.
What are the rules for closed captioning?
The FCC’s core quality standards require captions to be accurate (matching spoken dialogue), synchronous (timed to the audio), complete (running the full length of the program) and properly placed (not blocking faces, text or graphics). Beyond quality, the FCC also regulates who must caption content, how quickly captions must appear after a program first airs, and, as of the August 2026 compliance date, how accessible caption display settings must be on the devices and apps viewers use to watch.
