Deaf/hearing impaired TV, DVD, Cinema & the Arts news

Ofcom notes that the quality of pre-prepared captions (which are called ‘subtitles’ in the UK) is generally very good, and the majority of complaints it receives are related to live captioning. As caption quotas have risen, so have the number of programs being captioned live. Most of this captioning is now undertaken using speech recognition technology, but this is imperfect and errors are common. 

Following consultation with viewers and representative groups, Ofcom has concluded that the four key dimensions that affect the quality of live captions are:

That compromise is one that allows exhibitors to screen captioned movies across a wide range of sessions where the captions are seemingly ‘open’ to those that are wearing filtering glasses, very similar to 3D glasses. The glasses do not carry projection equipment making them lightweight and less bulky than current captioned cinema eyewear such as Sony’s.

Someone with a print disability is defined as a person without sight, a person whose sight is severely impaired, a person unable to hold or manipulate books or to focus or move his or her eyes, or a person with a perceptual disability, such as dyslexia.

Organisations with speakers at the conference include Vision Australia, the Australian law Reform Commission, Royal New Zealand Foundation of the Blind. Media Access Australia has two speakers: CEO, Alex Varley, and project manager, Dr Scott Hollier.

Scott has had a long career in access. He was formerly CEO of the Australian Caption Centre (the not-for-profit organisation from which Media Access Australia grew), and has a long-standing commitment to captions being of the highest possible quality.

GI: I’m one of a group of champions in a whole range of areas as to how the NBN is relevant to Australian society. I wasn’t in the original group and I kept going back to the minister, Stephen Conroy, and saying “Look, disability is the untold story of the NBN. I think you should have someone telling these stories.” He came back to me and said, “That’s great, will you do it?”

In February 2012, Lockrey was summoned for jury service in Lismore Court in northern NSW. He wrote to the court and requested live captioning be provided for him during the trial. After much correspondence, Lockrey was informed that captions would not be provided and that he had been excused from jury service because he is Deaf.

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:

Under current provisions in the Broadcasting Services Act, the only programs which need to be captioned on multichannels are repeats which were originally shown with captions on a network’s primary channel. The survey shows that captioning on the commercial networks’ multichannels remains largely confined to repeats, with some exceptions such as Neighbours, which screens on Eleven, and AFL matches on 7Mate. Overall, the Seven Network’s multichannels, 7Two and 7Mate, had the highest levels of captioning, with over 40% of programs between 6am and midnight being captioned.

Google’s YouTube is the global giant of online video, with over 72 hours of video being uploaded to the platform every minute. But with popularity comes responsibility. While YouTube in many ways could be seen as a pioneer of Deaf access online, the premature release of its auto-captioning feature could be doing more harm than good.

The mantra “poor quality captions are as good as no captions at all” will be familiar to many of us within the Deaf and hearing loss advocacy sector. It’s a common catch-cry when dealing with traditional broadcasters.

Report author Clarizza Fernandez said, "Australia is lagging behind its international counterparts like the UK and the US where there are clear guidelines for displaying 'CC' or 'AD' on EPGs.

"For the Deaf and hearing impaired, the blind and vision impaired, access information is essential and they should not be left out."