The town is looking at the possibility of providing close captioning for WCAT municipal meeting coverage and programming.
“We’ve had talks with WCAT about close captioning, and I think it is more of a cost item right now,” said Council President Jim Letterie.
Town Manager Tony Marino said the town did recently take advantage of a trial offer of the close captioning, and is looking at ways to provide it again.
“We only had so many minutes of that, so we chewed it up over the first two or three days that we were allowed to do it and that free close captioning service was gone,” said Marino.
WCAT officials are looking at pricing for continued close captioning services, as well as reaching out to Xfinity.
“We are getting an HD channel, so by having an HD channel, it may be easier to offer close captioning,” said Marino. “He is reaching out to them to see if that is something we can do once we get the HD channel launched. More to come on that, but I did stress to Mike (Cabral at WCAT) that it was a service that everybody liked and we certainly want to continue with it, especially with people at home who may be hard of hearing or have trouble hearing the people in the room having the words pop up.
“Even though some of them get a little jumbled, but for the most part it gets the general gist of the conversation.”
Marino said he asked WCAT to price out the options, and that if the pricing was reasonable, he would bring it back to the town council for potential funding options.
In other business, Precinct 5 Councilor Paul Reardon asked about the timeline for a proposed townwide parking and traffic study.
Marino said the request for proposals for a consultant to conduct the study is due back before the end of the month.
“Once I get the pricing back … then I’ll let you know what the pricing points came in at and then we can talk about how we want to fund it,” said Marino.
The town manager noted that when Winthrop conducted a sidewalk study, it took about six months and he expected that a full parking and traffic study would take longer than that.
“It’s a lot of work, they have to do all the analysis and collect all the data,” said Marino. “It will take a little while, but once we kick it off, I’ll have a better idea.”