ACAG, assembled in 2010 by the Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs, oversees and advises on the implementation of accessible screens, and the outcomes of the meeting have been released in a second communiqué to the public.
The communiqué is reproduced below.
The new condition complements Screen Australia’s requirement, introduced in 2007, for all feature films to be captioned.
This initiative follows recommendations from the Federal Government’s Media Access Review final report, in order to provide around 600,000 Australians who are blind or vision impaired with access to audio described feature films.
The Broadway Accessibility/Audience Expansion Initiative enables theatregoers to view captions or listen to audio description at every performance of designated shows.
Using technology developed by Sound Associates, the G-PASSaccess services of I-Caption and D-Scriptive are both automated systems, delivering captions or audio description that are synchronised to the show’s cueing system.
The EFHOH, which has been campaigning for increased levels of captioning for the last ten years, notes that some countries have made great progress in that time. The United Kingdom, the Netherlands and France now have 100% captioning on their main television channels, but other countries are lagging behind.
The EFHOH notes that there are 50 million Deaf and hearing impaired people in Europe, and believes that 100% of programs on all public TV channels should be captioned by 2020.
