Accessible Cinema

New laws in Japan designed to remove discrimination against people with disabilities will take effect from April 2016. One area that will benefit is access to cinema for hearing and vision impaired people.

Access to media is a growing feature at international conferences. A problem for Australian audiences is that these conferences are usually located in Europe or North America and tend to feature experts and case studies only from those regions of the world.

On 11 June 2015, the 1963 epic drama Al Nasser Saladin became the first Egyptian feature film to be screened with audio description for blind and vision impaired people.

The US state of Hawaii has brought in state legislation to mandate the provision of captions and audio description (described as “descriptive narration” in the Bill) in all cinemas where the cinema operator has more than two locations (that is three or more separate cinemas or cinema complexes).