Conducted by the Australian Institute, the survey showed that out of the 1294 respondents, 94% said they were aware of captioning, 30% said they sometimes used it and 3% said they always used the service when watching television.
The popular programs Emmerdale and Coronation Street are currently captioned on the service, and ITV has said that it intends to extend captioning to 70% of programs on it. Captions (which are called subtitles in the UK) are activated by pushing the ‘S’ button at the bottom of the screen. Programs on the ITV Player are only available to UK viewers.
The BBC launched captions on its catch-up service, the iPlayer, in 2008, while in Australia the ABC’s iView has had all prime-time programs captioned since March 2010.
While the previous series shown on Nine’s main channel was captioned, the first episode of the new series was not. This is in line with the Federal Government’s regulations concerning multichannels like GO!, which are only obliged to caption repeat programs that were originally screened on a network’s main channel with captions.
However, following the complaints, Nine has agreed to caption the new series from episode 2 onwards.
The survey was part of NCAM's development of a prototype automated assessment system for live captioning (including the captioning of news programs). The first stage of this process was to determine the relative severity of different sorts of errors.
