Centred around a Caption Quality Survey, the Accessible Regions Campaign asked people from regional areas about the quality and prevalence of captions on regional TV—to hold regional broadcasters to their captioning requirements. News and current affairs broadcasts in regional areas are required to be fully captioned, just as in metropolitan areas—including live crosses and other segments.
Even though regional TV broadcasters have the same captioning obligations as their metropolitan counterparts, survey respondents have noticed some real problems with captioning in regional areas. Issues raised so far include:
- Synchronisation problems between captions and the actual audio, so that the captions don’t make sense
- Captions which either move too fast to be read or bank up on the screen and don’t move off at all
- Some local news programs are either not captioned at all, or miss vital sections of the program like live crosses
To get involved in the Accessible Regions Campaign, or to find out more information about captioning issues in regional areas, visit the Media Access Australia website, call/TTY Media Access Australia on 02 9212 6242, or send us an email.
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