The report gives the ABC’s feedback on the technical aspects of delivering audio description (AD) in Australia’s broadcast environment. A number of key findings emerged from the report which will impact on delivery of a service in the future.
While there is no official statistic for the number of blind and vision impaired children in Australia, a reasonable estimate is 4,000. The vast majority of these school age children attend mainstream schools.
The study explores how the challenge of providing access to media and technology for blind and vision impaired students is met across the public, Catholic and independent sectors. The study draws on interviews with mainstream and specialist teachers and service providers.
Real time captions provide equal access to education by offering a rolling transcript of a teacher’s voice. They are created by a professional captioner working in a remote location, who coverts an audio feed into text. While the school district makes American Sign Language interpreters available, as Harrington does not use sign language she requires captions.
The complaint alleged that the captions were displaying considerably behind the dialogue on the +2 hours version of the program broadcast on 4 May 2013 on Foxtel. The investigation by the ACMA showed that although Foxtel was able to demonstrate that the original broadcast of the program two hours earlier was error-free and that it had no internal log of any problems on the plus 2 hours version, it did not have a copy of the program as transmitted and therefore could not show that there was no error.
