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The new, more accessible ABC iview
Transcript
13 April 2014
Roberta: The ABC has recently launched a redesign of its catch-up TV service, iview. Chris Mikul, Project Manager for Television, from Media Access Australia is here to tell us about the improvements that have been made to iview's accessibility. Welcome, Chris.
Chris: Hello, Roberta.
Roberta: Now, for the uninitiated, what is ABC iview?
Chris: Okay, well, as you said, it's what is usually called a catch-up TV service or an on-demand service. All of the networks have one now and it means that after a program has been broadcast on TV, not every program but most of the popular ones, it will then go up onto the catch-up service and then it's usually up for about a month so that people can watch it online on their PC or their mobile device or whatever.
Roberta: What improvements have been made to make it easier to use?
Chris: The main difference is that it's now well on its way to being WCAG compliant, so basically that means that the ABC is confident that the website and the mobile apps that it runs on are accessible to screen readers.
Roberta: What does WCAG mean?
Chris: WCAG, which is written as W C A G, stands for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. So they are basically a set of guidelines that have been formulated by the World Wide Web Consortium, or W3C, which is a body that's headed by Tim Berners-Lee, who is basically the man who invented the internet. They set international web standards, so WCAG are the accessibility standards. So in terms of blind and vision-impaired people it means things like to meet the standards a website has to have good colour contrast. It needs to fit the text set out in a logical way with proper headings and so on, so that people can navigate through it using a screen reader. I suppose for a catch-up service, the crucial thing is that you're able to find the video player and find the program you want and play it using your keyboard, so you're not relying on a mouse.
Roberta: Does the new iview have audio description?
Chris: Alas, no, and that is one thing where it means it's not actually WCAG compliant, or WCAG 2 compliant, because that does require an audio description. Of course, the reason for that is that ABC TV itself doesn't have audio description at the moment. So the player is basically mirroring the experience on TV. For example, if a program is captioned on TV, it will be captioned on the iview. Alas, as we both know, there's no audio description as yet, although we've been waiting a long time now.
Roberta: We'll just have to keep plugging.
Chris: Keep plugging away, yeah.
Roberta: Tell me just quickly, Chris, if you do listen to or watch a catch-up TV program can you pause it and fast-forward and all that sort of thing?
Chris: Yes, you can. It works just like video player, really.
Roberta: How does iview compare to other catch-up TV services then?
Chris: Well, as you can probably gather from that it's much better than the rest. We've given the other a bit of a test. Channel 7, or Network 7's one, which is called 7PLUS, is the best. There's only a few problems with that but the main thing is you can get into the video player and select play and pause and do that with the keyboard and it's fairly easy to use, so it's pretty good. Unfortunately the others aren't too good. The Nine one is called Jump In. Ten is called TENplay and SBS, I think, is just called SBS On Demand. They're all pretty terrible in terms of access, so there's a lot of work for people to do.
Roberta: Are they actually listening to the possibilities of upgrading things?
Chris: Well, look, Seven were targeted by a deaf activist probably about three years ago. I know that they did do some work on this a couple of years ago and then they reckoned they ran out of money. I'm assuming the work that they've done on their player is probably coming out of that. So, yeah, but these things take a long time to do.
Roberta: So, Chris, where can listeners start watching ABC iview?
Chris: Okay, so if you're on the internet using a web browser, go to www.iview.abc.net.au. If you're using a mobile device you can search for ABC iview in the App Store or on Google Play.
Roberta: You can find out more about how to access different types of video and online media at www.mediaaccess.org.au or you can call Chris and the team on 02 92126242. Thank you for all of that today, Chris. I've been speaking with Chris Mikul, Project Manager for Television, from Media Access Australia. Media Access Australia is a supporter of this program.