Podcast: New Zealand outpaces Australia in audio desciption

Roberta: Media Access Australia CEO, Alex Varley, joins us today having spent three days in New Zealand hosted by the Association of Blind Citizens New Zealand. He gave a series of seminars on audio description and is going to talk to us about the state of play of audio description in New Zealand, especially compared to Australia. Hello, Alex.

Alex: Hi there, Roberta.

Roberta: New Zealand TV has just broadcast its first ever New Zealand program with audio description. How advanced is audio description on TV in New Zealand?

Alex: Well, the sad news is that they’re way ahead of us at the moment. The New Zealanders started back in March broadcasting Coronation Street and now they’re moving onto locally produced programs. In fact, one of my colleagues is popping over to help train them up a bit more in doing some other programs. So New Zealand has an established service and it’s slowly growing. Whereas, of course, we’re still waiting to hear about our service.

Roberta: So how do you see the AD service progressing? Are there any issues around the funding and setup that could cause problems down the track?

Alex: Yes, the New Zealand set up is unusual in that its enCaptioning, which is a sort of a parallel service, are all actually funded by a government grant called From New Zealand On Air. And so what that means is the government is paying for all of the access services that are appearing on television and one of the TV stations, TV New Zealand, is actually delivering all those services. Now, the reason I think it’s an issue is that whilst it’s great in the short term to get things going, in the long term what that means is that TV stations will expect that the government will always fund these things, rather than seeing it as part of their core business, core things that they have to deliver.

Roberta: What about other areas, Alex, such as cinema and DVD?

Alex: Yeah, well, when I was over there I was giving a series of seminars for the Association of Blind Citizens and we had a look at cinema and DVD as part of that. Now, that’s a little different in terms of the messages. Cinema, they are a long way behind us in that they don’t have any audio description at all. But like us they are slowly converting across to digital cinema and what that will do is present some opportunities for audio description to be delivered like it is being here. But, in fact, the seminar I gave on cinema audio description, the people from the industry were there and they were very interested in talking through what the issues are. And I expect that we’ll see service there sometime soon. The DVD situation is basically exactly the same as Australia because your listeners may not realise but New Zealand is really treated as being another state of Australia by DVD distributors. So the DVDs are actually produced here in Australia and then shipped over on the ships to New Zealand. So whatever we get with audio description they get in New Zealand with audio description, as well.

Roberta: One of the more powerful approaches in Australia has been combined lobbying with deaf organisations to get access to media in general. Is this happening in New Zealand?

Alex: Yes, it is starting to. And I think this is one of the factors with New Zealand is that it’s a much smaller population and the main deaf groups are actually up in Auckland, whereas the blind groups are operating out of Wellington. And what’s happening there is they’re slowly realising, with some encouragement, that actually working together will get them more access and I think the first place we really will see this is in cinema. Because with cinema captioning there’s actually only three cinemas in New Zealand that show that and they will be interested in combining with the blind groups to get a lot more when the digital rollout happens. So I think it’s a good strategy. It’s worked well here and I think it will work well in New Zealand.

Roberta: So, Alex, if you were trying to predict what will happen with AD in both countries, where do you think it will go and why?

Alex: Ha ha, well, it’s always the big question, is what will happen in the future. I think the most important thing to say is there will be a lot more services in both countries. And that’s a very important thing that we need to focus on. I think it will actually roll out more quickly in Australia and that’s because we have a larger population and therefore a larger population of blind and vision-impaired people. So the market is bigger and the market is a very compelling driver of this. We also are much more of a media centre than New Zealand. You know, there’s lots of jokes about New Zealand being the sort of the edge of the world and they certainly are in media terms. So Australia has its own industry that will also drive these processes and we know the players in the industry. And also, Australia has had a longer history of audio description through cinema and through DVD. So we’re a fair way ahead of them.  New Zealand will basically, I think, ride on the coattails of us. So it will benefit from what’s happened with cinema here and will continue to do that, the same with DVD. But television will overtake them and then I think we’ll run in parallel. This side of the world, we’ve been a little bit behind Europe and other parts of the world but I think we’re quickly catching up and we’ll actually see some really good developments.

Roberta: That’s good news and I’m sure we’ll be talking about that in the future. Media Access Australia website has loads of information on audio description, including a catalogue of audio-described DVDs, audio-described cinema sessions and the latest in developments in Australia and overseas. Visit www.mediaaccess.org.au or give Media Access Australia a call on 02 92126242. Thank you, Alex, for talking with us today.

Alex: Thank you, Roberta.

Roberta: I’ve been speaking with Media Access Australia CEO, Alex Varley. And Media Access Australia are supporters of this program.