Television

The winners in each category were:

“This is fantastic news for all blind and vision impaired New Zealanders,” said Clive Lansink, National President of the Association of Blind Citizens of New Zealand. “We are grateful SKY has made this service available and, for some, it really will be life-changing.”

The audio description service, funded by NZ On Air, began after a trial in early 2011 and has now risen to 20 hours of audio described programs per week. This includes some of the country’s most loved shows, such as the home-grown soap opera Shortland Street.

BCA are interested in hearing about any issues people had trying to access the AD service, the quality of the description offered and what programs they would like described should any service be continued.

A joint initiative of Blind Citizens Australia, Vision Australia and Australian Communications Consumer Action Network, ‘It’s As Easy As ABC’ is encouraging people to send postcards to support the audio description service currently being trialled on the ABC until Sunday 4 November.

Campaigners say the trial is bringing access to over 600,000 Australians who are blind, vision impaired or can benefit from AD for the first time in Australian history.

The amendments, which were passed by the Senate in June, introduce quotas for subscription TV providers such as FOXTEL. These will increase incrementally and will range from 5% on music channels to 75% for movie channels by 1 July 2014.

Captioning quotas for free-to-air television will also increase incrementally to one hundred per cent of programming between 6 am and midnight by 2014. News and current affairs programs must be captioned no matter what time of day they are broadcast.

The campaign, It’s As Easy As ABC, will coordinate thousands of Australians to send postcards to Mark Scott and Stephen Conroy, requesting the service be made permanent beyond the AD trial’s scheduled end date of 4 November.

SBS has developed a system which automatically reformats television captions for use on online players and platforms. Now that the system is in place, no further human input is needed in the process, and there are no ongoing operational costs. SBS hopes to extend the process to live programs by the end of this month, and to provide captions to third party platforms where they are supported.