As in many countries, Ireland has a system of access targets for different channels which generally rise by a certain percentage each year. One of the proposals in BAI’s Access Rules Review Public Consultation is that, instead of having a single target for each year, there be a range of targets.
The BAI notes that, “There is much more home-produced Irish programming and more live programming and this has implications for the type of subtitling used and the skills and costs involved.” Note that in Ireland, as in the UK, captions are called subtitles. It suggests that the access rules “should do more to encourage broadcasters to focus on not just availability of subtitles but also the reliability and quality of subtitles”. In other words, if a broadcaster concentrated on improving quality, or began to caption a live program, it should be allowed to aim for the lower end of the target range.
TV Access, a coalition of organisations in the disability and ageing sector, strongly disagrees with this proposal. “We think it is fundamentally wrong to play off quality against quantity in this way. The effect of this may be to make the higher targets meaningless since all broadcasters will likely claim that they are working hard to improve quality.”
TV Access notes that none of Ireland’s six main channels have met their access targets in the last three years. It is equally scathing about another BAI proposal, that there be a new set of targets “based on average increases in subtitling achieved over the last number of years”, which would see targets fall by up to 47%. “It is shocking that the existing targets, though far lower than in many other countries…have not been met by broadcasters and that the BAI’s proposal is to reduce them rather than increase them.”
Only RTÉ, Ireland’s public broadcaster, has been set targets for sign language and audio description. BAI notes that these targets, which currently stand at 1%, have not been met, and proposes they be increased to 2% by 2016. In its submission, the National Council for the Blind in Ireland (NCBI) notes that BAI has not asked for comments about the proposed audio description targets.
“We can only conclude that either the BAI has already made up its mind prior to the consultation or that the BAI considers this issue so unimportant that it has forgotten to ask the question!” TV Access finds the omission “shocking and alarming”, and calls for audio description and sign language targets to be set for all broadcasters.
TV Access’s submission, along with those of several other organisations, can be downloaded from the TV Access website.
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