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Human Rights Commission requests further information on subscription TV captioning

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The Human Rights Commission is currently considering an application from the Australian Subscription Television and Radio Association (ASTRA) for an exemption from the Disability Discrimination Act 1992 in relation to captioning. The Commission has now sent a letter to ASTRA which asks a number of detailed questions prompted by submissions about the application.

ASTRA has been asked to:

· Provide details of ASTRA members’ profit, and the amount spent on captioning, for the year 2009-2010, to support its contention that ‘an obligation to caption all programming on all channels would be financially prohibitive’.

· Comment on the proposal in several submissions that the ASTRA members spend 1% of annual turnover on captioning.

· Provide information about how the percentages of captioning proposed for each channel under an exemption agreement were determined.

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Television

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Major American Audio Description Conference announced

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The American Council of the Blind is hosting its annual conference in Phoenix, Arizona in July. As part of this, the Audio Description Project is holding an integrated 3-day conference.

Covering a range of audio description issues and with a range of international experts, the program includes:

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Television

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Human Rights Commission releases submissions to the subscription television exemption application

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The Australian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) has released submissions to the Australian Subscription Television and Radio Association’s (ASTRA) application on minimum captioning requirements. The application, if accepted, would make ASTRA exempt from complaints under section 55 of the Disability Discrimination Act (Cth) (DDA) in exchange for undertaking to increase the level of captioning on subscription television.

The AHRC has released submissions from Media Access Australia, the Deafness Council of Western Australia (DCWA), Vision Australia, the Deafness Forum of Australia, the Disability Discrimination Legal Service (Victoria) (DDLS), Deaf Australia and Accessible Arts NSW. To read the submission, go to the AHRC website.

To read summaries of these submissions, visit our enquiries and consultations section.

Taxonomy:

Australian policy and legislation

AHRC, Australian Human Rights Commission

Deaf or hearing impaired

ASTRA, Australia Subscription Television and Radio Association

Research & policy

Subscription TV

Temporary exemption application

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New cinema access system moves to development phase

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SightCine, a Los Angeles based start-up company, has secured development funding to create a prototype of its caption glasses concept. The idea is that the captions are displayed on the screen but are only visible to people wearing the glasses.

There is not much detail in exactly how the glasses work, but other systems using glasses have been developed before. In February 2007 an emerging technologies demonstration was showcased at a cinema in Washington DC. This was reported in Winter 2007 issue of The Media Access Report (“R&D For Cinema Captioning Systems”, p16).

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