Every month, the Federal Communications Commission holds an open meeting, a public event at which the agency’s five commissioners vote on whether to adopt new regulations and act on particular agenda items. The meetings typically fill their scheduled two-hour time slots, but the most recent one, which took place on November 17th, lasted all of nine minutes. (Commissioner Mignon Clyburn spent several of those minutes thanking the fall interns and tearfully eulogizing the journalist Gwen Ifill.) In the press conference that immediately followed, Tom Wheeler, the Democratic chairman of the F.C.C., explained the reason for the curtailed agenda: congressional Republicans, led by Senator John Thune, had asked him and his colleagues to shelve anything “complex, partisan, or otherwise controversial” until after Donald Trump’s inauguration as President in January. Such requests, according to Amina Fazlullah, the director of policy at the Benton Foundation, a public-interest nonprofit, are “one hundred per cent normal.” She noted that, in late 2008, Democratic leaders demanded the same of George W. Bush’s F.C.C. head. “It doesn’t make a ton of sense to work on an item that you know the incoming Administration will then work to undo,” Fazlullah told me.

The F.C.C.’s self-imposed hiatus means that a number of high-profile regulations are unlikely to be acted upon until Trump takes office, if ever. These include a proposal to make cable companies offer alternatives to the set-top box, which many Americans pay hundreds of dollars every year to lease; expanding subsidized mobile broadband Internet in rural and tribal areas; and capping prices on the kinds of large data networks that serve hospitals, libraries, and schools—all of which largely benefit consumers at the expense of telecommunications providers. It’s also possible that the F.C.C. under Trump will roll back some of its predecessor’s rules, most notably on net neutrality. Fazlullah pointed out that the President-elect’s transition team has given very little indication of its position on these issues, making informed speculation an impossibility. Jeffrey Eisenach, a former Verizon consultant and current visiting scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, is reportedly advising Trump on technology policy. He declined my request for comment.

But, while net-neutrality and consumer-rights advocates are already girding themselves for a fight, a much less controversial issue is falling through the cracks. At the bottom of the deleted agenda for Thursday’s F.C.C. meeting was an item titled “Video Description: Implementation of the Twenty-First Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act of 2010.”

Video description is exactly what it sounds like: a narrator explains, for the benefit of the blind or visually impaired, what’s happening onscreen during a TV show or movie, squeezing his or her voice-over into the gaps between dialogue. The feature became available on television in the late nineteen-eighties, although it was first proposed in 1974, and provided informally by friends and family for decades before that. Marco Salsiccia, a former animation and visual-effects artist in the film industry who lost his eyesight completely two years ago, said that the technology has limitations. “You miss a lot of visual gags, and there’s only so much they can fit in,” he said. “Like ‘The Wolf of Wall Street’—that’s a Scorsese film, so there’s nothing but dialogue, and there’s no time to describe anything.” But, even though hearing video description is not the same as watching something with your own eyes, he added, “at least it opens the door for you to participate.” Eric Bridges, the executive director of the American Council of the Blind, who has been blind since birth, told me that before video description he used to make up his own plotlines in order to avoid bothering sighted people with questions.

The problem, however, is that not many shows have video description. Currently, F.C.C. regulations require the four broadcast networks (ABC, CBS, Fox, and NBC) to provide just four hours of the service per week, for primetime or children’s programming. Five cable channels (USA, TNT, TBS, History, and Disney) are subject to the same requirement. “It’s not a lot,” Salsiccia said. “Thankfully, I was able to watch all of ‘Breaking Bad’ before I lost my vision. But ‘The Walking Dead’ and ‘Game of Thrones’—everyone’s talking about them, and I have to sit back and say, O.K., I can’t really watch that because I don’t know what’s happening.” The last deleted agenda item from last Thursday’s open meeting would have expanded the F.C.C.’s requirement by more than half, up to nearly seven hours per week, and applied it to the top ten non-broadcast channels, including premium ones such as HBO and AMC.

The proposal was an extension of an existing statute, the Twenty-first Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act of 2010, and expanding accessibility is, usually, a bipartisan issue. “To see that all our progress could be stopped so fast by this election—it’s really spooked people,” Mark Richert, the director of public policy at the American Foundation for the Blind, told me. Fazlullah agreed. “I think for most of the advocacy field, it’s a little bit baffling to see this particular item get pulled off,” she said. Unlike some of the F.C.C.’s other initiatives, which critics oppose as being too expensive and cumbersome, video description is relatively cheap to implement. The agency estimates that the one-time cost to have an hour of programming described ranges from twenty-five hundred to forty-one hundred dollars—between 0.08 and 0.2 per cent of the over-all production costs of one episode of an hour-long TV drama.

Bridges acknowledged that, in the grand scheme of post-election policy debates, the question of whether to provide better TV programming for the blind might not seem critical, at least to the sighted community. “We often talk about accessible technology for employment and for education, and that’s really important,” he said. “But, when we go home, we’ve never really had meaningful access to the leisure and entertainment provided by television.” Blind and visually impaired people are not only missing out on escapist amusements, he explained; they’re also being cut off from an important aspect of American social and cultural life. “As a blind father of a sighted child, I can tell you that it is wonderfully enjoyable to be able to watch a show with him and understand why he’s laughing,” Bridges said.

Getting the F.C.C. to mandate even today’s paltry amount of video description took more than two decades. “It was the very first thing I was asked to do when I started interning at the American Foundation for the Blind, in 1994,” Richert said. The current requirement was suggested in 1999 and adopted in 2000, only to be blocked, in 2002, by the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, which agreed with entertainment-industry lawyers that the F.C.C. lacked the authority to impose such a rule. It took Congress another eight years to explicitly vest the agency with that authority. “So, on Thursday, after all these years of down-in-the-weeds, incredibly aggravating history, you had this proposal that has been negotiated for months, that is literally printed and ready to be voted on,” Richert said. “To have it be pulled at the last minute is deeply frustrating.” Given Trump’s behavior and rhetoric on the campaign trail, Salsiccia told me—in particular, his mocking impression of a disabled journalist—“a strong fear of regression on accessibility issues is setting in.”