The Television Access Services: Final report on 2012 also shows that audio description levels are high. While their mandatory quotas are 10%, a number of channels, including ITV1 (in England and Wales), Channel 4, Sky (for its non-sport channels) and the BBC have committed to audio describing 20% of their programs.
46 per cent of the people who took part in the online survey complained about captioning (called subtitling in the UK) on news programs, with the most commonly identified problems being a delay between speech and the caption appearing on screen, and poor accuracy of captions. These are problems commonly associated with live captioning.
The access requirements will be the same as those applied to domestic broadcasters. They consist of quotas which, after ten years, rise to 80% for captioning, 10% for audio description and 5% for signing. Ofcom may decide to reduce these quotas for channels where the access services would cost more than 1% of their relevant turnover.
The report, Television Access Services: Report for the first six months of 2012, has shown that many channels are significantly exceeding both the captioning (called subtitling in the UK) and audio description (AD) quotas, including on free-to-air channels, such as ITV and BBC, movies and sports channels.
