Policy

Media Access Australia’s Director of Digital Accessibility, Dr Scott Hollier, will be presenting on developments in access technology for blind and vision impaired people at the Blind Citizens Australia (BCA) national convention in Perth on 10th October.

HbbTV (Hybrid Broadcast Broadband TV) is a digital platform which provides seamless integration of traditional broadcast TV and content delivered over the internet. It also offers opportunities for improving the accessibility of TV, and these are being explored by a European consortium, HBB4ALL.

Access to media is a growing feature at international conferences. A problem for Australian audiences is that these conferences are usually located in Europe or North America and tend to feature experts and case studies only from those regions of the world.

Access to media through audio description and captioning is well established through most of Europe, North America and the English-speaking world. However, the situation in other parts of the globe is very mixed. Reporting in Australia is, not suprisingly, biased towards English language developments and advances. What is happening in other parts of the world, especially in Asia?