GI: I’m one of a group of champions in a whole range of areas as to how the NBN is relevant to Australian society. I wasn’t in the original group and I kept going back to the minister, Stephen Conroy, and saying “Look, disability is the untold story of the NBN. I think you should have someone telling these stories.” He came back to me and said, “That’s great, will you do it?”
In February 2012, Lockrey was summoned for jury service in Lismore Court in northern NSW. He wrote to the court and requested live captioning be provided for him during the trial. After much correspondence, Lockrey was informed that captions would not be provided and that he had been excused from jury service because he is Deaf.
An ongoing service trial would provide viewers who are blind and vision impaired with a similar service to the 2012 technical trial, while allowing the ABC to resolve any issues involved in delivering AD nationally.
The ‘It’s as easy as ABC’ campaign is calling on supporters to write to Senator Stephen Conroy, the Minister for Communications, and Mark Scott, the ABC’s Managing Director, asking them to proceed with the service trial this year.
Under current provisions in the Broadcasting Services Act, the only programs which need to be captioned on multichannels are repeats which were originally shown with captions on a network’s primary channel. The survey shows that captioning on the commercial networks’ multichannels remains largely confined to repeats, with some exceptions such as Neighbours, which screens on Eleven, and AFL matches on 7Mate. Overall, the Seven Network’s multichannels, 7Two and 7Mate, had the highest levels of captioning, with over 40% of programs between 6am and midnight being captioned.
