Blind/vision impaired TV, DVD, Cinema & the Arts news

Along with funding for DisabilityCare and education reform, funding to the ABC was boosted by $104.9 million. This money is allocated to news and current affairs and digital delivery of programming. What is noticeably absent is funding for an audio description service. Audio description is essential for providing equal access to television for people who are blind and vision impaired.

First Dog On The Moon (as the cartoonist likes to be known) takes a cast of animal characters and has them play out the political stories making headlines. In this universe, Prime Minister Julia Gillard becomes Power Fox and Senator Barnaby Joyce a talking pumpkin scone. The cartoons, while visually simple, involve many frames and long exchanges of dialogue.

Speaking on the video, Get the Picture – making television easier for people with a sight loss (below), audio description user James Risdon says that the service “is absolutely fantastic for someone like myself who hasn’t got enough sight to see what’s happening on screen”.

The public service announcement, which can be viewed on YouTube, depicts two scenarios which would only be comprehensible to a blind or vision impaired person with audio description (called ‘described video’ in Canada).

I want you to sit back and imagine something if you will. Imagine coming home from a long day and settling down in front of the TV like everyone else does of an evening.  You switch on the set and find that The Big Bang Theory is on. Sheldon has just done something crazy as always and the results are causing the audience to laugh hard and clap loudly. But you have no idea what is happening and it is never explained in a way that will allow you to enjoy the wonderful visual comedy that others are able to view. 

An ongoing service trial would provide viewers who are blind and vision impaired with a similar service to the 2012 technical trial, while allowing the ABC to resolve any issues involved in delivering AD nationally.

The ‘It’s as easy as ABC’ campaign is calling on supporters to write to Senator Stephen Conroy, the Minister for Communications, and Mark Scott, the ABC’s Managing Director, asking them to proceed with the service trial this year.

Voice Guidance was developed by Panasonic in conjunction with the Royal National Institute of the Blind (RNIB) in the UK, and was first included in a range of models released to the UK and Irish markets in 2012.

Included in the list of winners are AT&T, Best Buy, Panasonic, Regal Entertainment Group and the Royal National Institute of the Blind (RNIB). Recognition was given to their products and services that showed innovation in order to cater to the needs of people with disabilities.

Winners of the 2013 Access Awards are:

Distributors 20th Century Fox, Accent, Eagle, Gryphon and Madman all had titles released internationally with either captions or subtitles that were not released in Region 4, a market which includes Australia, New Zealand, South America and Oceania.

Further still, both Disney and Icon released titles locally without audio description where this feature was available in international territories. Those movies were Now Is Good from Disney and Beasts of the Southern Wild from Icon.

The titles with both audio description and captions are:

According to the new mandate, the video providers must provide an audible version of the emergency information, whether it is crawling text or graphics, so that it is accessible to the blind or vision impaired. Emergency information must also be prioritised over foreign language translation and video description. This is in line with changes brought by the Twenty-First Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act 2010 (CVAA). The new rules are to be applied within two years.