Chris Mikul has been with captioning for more than twenty years and is the Project Manager focused on television and accessibility.
What have been a few of the highlights of 2010 for you in your area of access?
The highlight was definitely the release of the final report of the Government’s Media Access Review last week. This has a whole host of terrific initiatives in it, particularly an audio description trial on the ABC next year, increased caption quotas, a provision about caption quality to be included in the Broadcasting Services Act, and strengthening the powers of the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) relating to captioning.
Another useful development was the captioning meetings that ACMA has recently been organising. This is the first time that you’ve had government, consumer groups, TV networks and access suppliers all in the same room together, and provides a good opportunity to thrash out the issues.
What was one of the challenges faced in your area in 2010?
Dealing with issues surrounding caption quality, and in particular the quality of captions on live programs, is always a challenge. Speech recognition software is increasingly used in the creation of captions, and with access suppliers under financial pressure, there is sometimes a temptation to caption some programs ‘live’ when the captions should really be pre-prepared. The networks don’t always like to acknowledge there are problems, so I spend a lot of time monitoring captions and liaising between the networks and disgruntled viewers.
How do you see accessibility improving in 2011?
The audio description (AD) trial will be the big one. AD is well established on TV in Britain and America, so the fact that there is no service on Australian television yet is frankly embarrassing. There are still a lot of questions about how the service will be delivered, and a lot of people both within the TV industry and among the general public still don’t know that much about AD, so the trial will hopefully rectify a lot of that. The challenge will be to get a regular AD service in place after the trial finishes, but this is an essential first step.
We will also see caption levels continue to rise on TV, and some of the Media Access Review’s recommendations will facilitate that. And hopefully we will see some of the problems associated with online media – such as a lack of captions on some ‘catch-up’ TV services – begin to be rectified.
What’s your top pick for a gift with accessible features this festive season?
We get quite a few people ringing MAA and asking what HDD and DVD recorders they should buy to record captions. This is a tricky area. A digital receiver like a TV or set-top box has to show captions to conform to Australian standards, but there are no requirements for equipment to record captions, so a lot of recorders on the market won’t. And if you go into an electronics shop, the sales people there often don’t know how particular recorders will handle captions.
However, one HDD/DVD recorder which I can recommend – because we got one into the office to test it – is the Panasonic DMR-XW380 Hard Drive DVD Recorder. It’s easy to use and the captions you record onto DVD on it can be played on any other machine.
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