A press release from the NFD notes that “New Zealand TV captioning is among the worst in the western world with even Uganda having a better service than us. While some captioning is funded by NZ On Air and a high quality captioning service is provided by TV1, TV2 and TV3 it amounts to less than 10% of total TV hours each week across all free to air and subscriber pay channels.”
A survey conducted by the working group earlier this year found that New Zealand’s Deaf and hearing impaired community “felt a string sense of injustice and frustration” at the lack of captions on TV and video and in cinemas, and 86% of respondents favoured compulsory captioning on TV.
In Australia, the Broadcasting Services Act requires broadcasters to caption all programs between 6pm and midnight, and all news and current affairs programs, on their primary channels. The Federal Government’s Media Access Reviewhas recommended that the act be amended to include mandatory captioning levels leading to 100% of programs screened on the primary channels between 6am to midnight being captioned by the end of 2014. This legislation is expected to be passed early next year, but it will still leave Australia behind the UK and US, where captioning on the major channels is at or close to 100% over 24 hours.
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