Current state of audio description in the United States: television, movies and DVDs

Transcript

19 October 2014

Roberta: Media Access Australia Project Manager, Chris Mikul, is with us today to give us a rundown on the state of audio description on television, movies and DVDs in the United States. Welcome, Chris.

Chris: Hello, Roberta.

Roberta: Firstly, what's the situation with audio description on television?

Chris: Audio description has had a very rocky road in America. Initially there was a ruling back in 2000 that was issued by the Federal Communications Commission, the FCC, to put rules in place for audio description for the first time and basically said that the four largest free-to-air networks and the five largest cable channels or subscription channel providers, whatever, they had to broadcast four hours of audio description a week. The broadcasting industry then kicked up a huge stink about that and they went to court and they got that ruling overturned, which meant that audio description didn't entirely disappear but there was very low levels of it. There was a lot of work done to get those rules put back into place and they bore fruit in 2010, when new legislation reinstated the rules, but unfortunately it only put the levels at the 2000 levels. So it's still currently four hours a week on those networks and channels and they have the ability to raise that to seven hours in 2016 but, again, that's nothing to get terribly excited about and unfortunately there's probably not going to be much improvement for a while. There's a woman called Karen Peltz Strauss. She's one of the people who worked on the legislation. She's with the FCC and she was speaking at the Audio Description Conference which was held in Las Vegas this year. She basically said that because the FCC had its initial ruling overturned any increase would be up to Congress and that suggests to me that it's going to be probably a few years. So that's the situation there, so there's some audio description but not a great deal.

Roberta: Not at all and what about cinema?

Chris: Cinema is interesting. I haven't been able to get the stats on sort of percentages of audio-described, like movie screenings, but we do know that as cinemas have been moving to digital in recent years they've acquired the ability to have closed captions and audio description because that sort of just comes with the package. We know that there are audio description files available for most sort of major release movies. So we know there's quite a lot of screens over there but until now there hasn't been any sort of rules or legislation or anything but it looks like that is going to change because the Department of Justice in July issued what they call a notice of proposed rule changing, which basically means they're going to change the relevant disability act, which is The Americans with Disability Act, and say that cinemas have to have audio description and closed captioning and they're going to do that later this year. So they're talking about giving digital cinemas six months to do that, so that's going to make quite a difference there and, again, it shows that really legislation is the way to go to get access happening.

Roberta: Now, Chris, how does audio description on American DVDs compare with what's available here?

Chris: Well, this is the one area where we actually have the edge on them. The American DVD and, I suppose more recently, Blu-ray distributors were very, very slow to pick up on audio description and I remember five years ago there's a website in America called the Audio Description Project. They would put up every new release that had audio description and you were lucky to get one or two a month. It was very, very poor. Whereas in Australia the distributors have actually been quite good. Roadshow sort of led the way on this. They started to put audio description on their DVDs back in 2006, I suppose, and since then a few other distributors have done the same. They've been good in importing audio description files when they're available from overseas, putting them on the releases here. So every time we do a survey we find that there's up to 40 percent of new release rental DVDs that have audio description, so it's actually much better than the States. So that's one area where we're ahead, at least.

Roberta: Well, Chris, we're almost out of time but I wanted to ask you about what's happening on TV in Australia.

Chris: That's all that's happening. I mean, you had Alex the other day talking about the iView and there's another meeting in November and that's sort of it.

Roberta: Well, we'll be keeping a close eye on that and hopefully November will get a result of how they are going to do that. Well, for more information on audio description you can call 02 9212 6242 or email Media Access Australia at info@mediaaccess.org.au or you can go to their website, www.mediaaccess.org.au. I thank Chris Mikul today for all of that, who is Project Manager with Media Access Australia, and Media Access Australia is a supporter of this program.

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