Join the campaign for caption quality

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Friday, 16 November 2012 12:01pm

The Australian Communications Consumer Action Network (ACCAN) is seeking Caption Campaigners who can monitor TV programs and report on poor quality captioning.

The campaign, which has been organised in conjunction with the Deafness Forum and Deaf Australia, comes after amendments to the Broadcasting Services Act, which took effect in June 2012, make captions of adequate quality a television license condition. The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) has been given increased powers to ensure caption quality on both free-to-air and subscription television, and it is expected that a draft of its quality guidelines will be released for public comment in December.

Most of the problems with captioning on Australian TV relate to live captioning, which has becoming increasingly common in recent years. Caption Campaigners will be looking for programs on which the captions are incomprehensible, missing words or are poorly synchronised with the audio. ACCAN will provide them with all the information they need to lodge effective complaints with the ACMA.

Like us, ACCAN has a long history of supporting the needs of people with a disability when it comes to communications issues. They provided the grant for our sociABILITY: social media for people with a disability project and was one of three organisations that ran the recent campaign to keep audio description on the ABC.

ACCAN has put together a how-to guide to make campaigning for quality captions as easy as possible. If you are interested in being a Caption Campaigner please email Wayne Hawkins at ACCAN, call 02 9288 4000 or TTY 02 9281 5322.


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