In keeping with the House’s recent captioning award for entertainment, cinema & the arts captioning, its commitment to providing accessible arts continues with the development of a new accessible video player and the top four FODI session videos captioned for everyone’s enjoyment.
Michael Small, formerly of the Australian Human Rights Commission, was a joint winner of the Minister’s Award for Excellence in Disability Reform. During his time at the commission, Small was instrumental in achieving significant improvements in access to television, cinema and DVDs through increased levels of captioning.
CaptionMatch gives the example of a man with a hearing impairment who wants to attend a lecture in a museum, but realises he will need real-time captioning to be able to follow it. He registers the job on CaptionMatch, and a local captioning company expresses interest in doing it, providing a rough costing. The man contacts the museum, which agrees to pay for the captioning. CaptionMatch requests that the caption provider pay a matching fee of $10, plus 8% of actual billing to cover their costs.
Ten new family-friendly short films have also made the cut, including award winners The Maker (Best Animation at Sydney Film Festival 2012) andThe Missing Key (Best Short Animated Film, Inside Film Awards). Another program favourite will be the Dr Seuss-style What a Debacle, Freddy Farkle narrated by Barry Humphries.
