UK catch-up TV service ramps up audio description

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Wednesday, 2 September 2015 11:11am

UK television network ITV has announced an increase in the amount of programming available with audio description on its ITV Player service for Android.

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While ITV provides audio description on about 20% of its programs, until recently only two of them, Coronation Street and Emmerdale, were available with it on the ITV Player. Several more programs have now been added which can be watched with audio description via the ITV Player app for Android, and it is planned to extend these to other platforms in the coming months. By next year, ITV hopes to be providing audio description on 30 hours of programming per week on its catch-up service.

For more information, see the article on the RNIB website.

Last year, the UK communications regulator Ofcom told catch-up TV providers and other video-on-demand (VOD) services that they have until the end of 2016 to provide acceptable levels of captioning, audio description and signing or face legislation which will make this compulsory. Media Access Australia has produced a comprehensive report, Access on Demand, which looks at captioning audio and audio description levels on VOD services in Australia and internationally.


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