(a) As described in this section, the commissioner of human services must enter into grant agreements with television stations to make live local news programming accessible to persons who are deaf, persons who are hard-of-hearing, and persons who are deafblind as defined in section 256C.23.

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(b) The grant agreements must provide for:

(1) real-time captioning services for broadcasting that is not emergency broadcasting subject to 47 C.F.R. § 79.2;

(2) real-time captioning services for commercial broadcasters in areas of Minnesota where commercial broadcasters are not subject to the live programming closed-captioning requirements of 47 C.F.R. § 79.1(d); and

(3) real-time captioning for large-market noncommercial broadcasters who produce live news programming.

(c) For the purposes of this section, “real-time captioning” means a method of captioning in which captions are simultaneously prepared and transmitted at the time of origination by specially trained real-time captioners.