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Alex Varley reports from M-Enabling
Transcript
1 September 2013
Roberta: With us today is Alex Varley, Chief Executive of Media Access Australia. Alex is going to tell us about the M-Enabling Conference, which took place in Sydney recently, and a call for new Australian legislation which would make audio description compulsory. Welcome, Alex.
Alex: Hi there, Roberta. How are you?
Roberta: I’m well, thank you. Now, what is the M-Enabling Conference?
Alex: The M-Enabling Conference, which my colleague, Scott Hollier, talked a little bit about this last week but it was basically an Australian leg on a worldwide tour of talking about technology and disability and the possibilities of where things can go, and I think the thing that was quite interesting about it is that there was a bit of a focus on the whole area of accessibility for blind people and other disabilities and how you can use legislation to do that.
Roberta: So what was the highlight of the conference for you?
Alex: For me, on that very matter, one of the keynote speakers was a woman called Karen Peltz Strauss and Karen is actually a bit of a hero in the accessibility world. She actually pretty much drafted this thing called The Twenty-First Century Video Accessibility Act, which I’ve talked about before. That’s the piece of legislation that has really revolutionised access to media and online media in the USA. Karen is a very interesting person in that she was both working on the advocacy side in the early days, to actually get the whole thing going, and then she ended up working for the Regulator to implement the whole thing. So she had that lovely, lovely opportunity of implementing something that she knew all about. She spoke extensively about this at the conference and for me that was an absolute highlight.
Roberta: So is there a need for similar legislation here?
Alex: Yes, well, what Karen really talked about, and I think what we can learn from this, is that firstly there are times when the markets and progress that people try and make by themselves just simply doesn’t work. I think a lot of your listeners would agree that on things like these new video-on-demand services and other internet services that hard-fought access on things like cinema and DVDs just seems to fall by the wayside again and everyone gets forgotten. So when that happens, as Karen pointed out in her talk, really the ultimate solution and the only solution to push this along is that you need to have some kind of regulation or legislation, but she did temper that with saying that the whole basis of that needs to be practical. So a lot of people will say the government needs to fix this or we need some kind of regulations, but what people really have to do is think about what that means in terms of how it could be implemented, what sort of things need to change and what sort of things might happen anyway. To give you a quick example of that, people can watch some of these streaming video services on iPhones and tablets and other mobile devices and the market is actually making those quite accessible, and the M-Enabling had a lot of description of that and demonstration of that. So you might not focus so much on what device am I going to watch it on but you will certainly be focusing on what content should actually be like that. That’s clearly what Australia needs and, in fact, the conference called for Australia to adopt some legislation like that.
Roberta: Alex, has there been any further word on an audio description service for Australian TV?
Alex: Yes, of course, that’s been a hot topic for well over a year for us all now. and we had that trial which ultimately didn’t deliver a full service. I think what I would say is that the election has put a hold on that, as it has on many things, and we’re expecting to see some action once we know who the new government is. I do know that Blind Citizens Australia have actually put in some complaints into the Human Rights Commission and they are being dealt with and I think that will be quite a good catalyst for things to happen because I know, for example, the Opposition has certainly said that their viewpoint is that the ABC should be doing this kind of thing under its charter and it doesn’t require any special legislation of special funding. They should just get on and deal with it. So I would say to everybody, you’ve been patient for a long, long time but I expect some action after we know who the government is.
Roberta: Listeners, if you want to know more about audio description, Media Access Australia have a website, www.mediaaccess.org.au, or you can contact them at info@mediaaccess.org.au or there’s the phone, 02 9212 6242. Thank you, Alex, for all of that.
Alex: Thanks, Roberta.
Roberta: With us today has been Alex Varley, Chief Executive of Media Access Australia. Media Access Australia is a supporter of this program.