In February 2012, Lockrey was summoned for jury service in Lismore Court in northern NSW. He wrote to the court and requested live captioning be provided for him during the trial. After much correspondence, Lockrey was informed that captions would not be provided and that he had been excused from jury service because he is Deaf.
Distributors 20th Century Fox, Accent, Eagle, Gryphon and Madman all had titles released internationally with either captions or subtitles that were not released in Region 4, a market which includes Australia, New Zealand, South America and Oceania.
Further still, both Disney and Icon released titles locally without audio description where this feature was available in international territories. Those movies were Now Is Good from Disney and Beasts of the Southern Wild from Icon.
The titles with both audio description and captions are:
Under current provisions in the Broadcasting Services Act, the only programs which need to be captioned on multichannels are repeats which were originally shown with captions on a network’s primary channel. The survey shows that captioning on the commercial networks’ multichannels remains largely confined to repeats, with some exceptions such as Neighbours, which screens on Eleven, and AFL matches on 7Mate. Overall, the Seven Network’s multichannels, 7Two and 7Mate, had the highest levels of captioning, with over 40% of programs between 6am and midnight being captioned.
Google’s YouTube is the global giant of online video, with over 72 hours of video being uploaded to the platform every minute. But with popularity comes responsibility. While YouTube in many ways could be seen as a pioneer of Deaf access online, the premature release of its auto-captioning feature could be doing more harm than good.
The mantra “poor quality captions are as good as no captions at all” will be familiar to many of us within the Deaf and hearing loss advocacy sector. It’s a common catch-cry when dealing with traditional broadcasters.
