I am hard of hearing from military service in the US Army.

I rely on the closed captioning as a consumer of virtually everything I watch on TV.

It has come to my attention that news stations are ditching quality live broadcast captioners in favor of the cheaper lower quality Automated Captioning/ AI.

Automated Captions should be held to the same standard by the FCC as live broadcast captioners are held to which I believe is at least 95% accurate.

Automated captions are poor in many ways,  I cannot tell who is speaking often because they do not accurately distinguish speaker changes.  The captions are often too fast to read and are not accurate. 

I cannot imagine what it is like to be totally deaf and have to rely on low quality captions.  According to Johns Hopkins there are 48,000,000 deaf and hard of hearing in the United States alone. Not to mention people who watch captions on TV at medical office waiting rooms and gyms etc.

We rely heavily on TV for news and entertainment as much as people with normal hearing.  If nothing else, sign this petition and help people keep their jobs.  With automated captions, it is a lose/lose situation for both audience and captioners.  Only party benefiting is the station because automated captions are cheap.

Please consider signing this petition to help the large number of hearing impaired  demand that stations start using live captioners again.