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Labour MP Lillian Greenwood has submitted a private member’s bill to the House of Commons in support of Subtitle It!, a campaign to improve the accessibility of video-on-demand (VOD) services.

The Department of Communications is undertaking a comprehensive review of Australia’s communications regulator, the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA), to ensure that the organisation is equipped to meet the challenges of a rapidly changing media landscape.

One of the identified audiences for Media Access Australia’s CAP THAT! campaign is students with diverse learning needs. This includes students who have an Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD), which represents about 0.5% of Australians according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics SDAC Survey¹.

The accessibility of video-on-demand (VOD) services is a hot topic in Australia, the UK and other countries at the moment. There have been calls for legislation to be introduced unless the VOD services make acceptable progress in introducing captions and audio description voluntarily. But what constitutes accessible progress? In the UK, the Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB), Action on Hearing Loss, and Sense (who represent people who are deafblind or have associated disabilities) have issued a report that attempts to answer that question.