International policy and legislation

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Global progress on social media accessibility

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Today marks the one-year anniversary of the release of our sociABILITY: social media for people with a disability resources. The project was the first of its kind and is being used as a keystone in a global push towards recognising people with disability as a large and influential audience on social media.

While social media networks still present access barriers, there are steps organisations and individuals can take to reduce them. For instance, Facebook does not let you provide alternative text for images and so Media Access Australia provides this in the first comment below the image. Similarly, when posting a link to a video we will always mention whether it is captioned or audio described.

Digital media and technology: 

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Canada first country to achieve 100% broadcast captioning

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Canada is already a world leader in television captioning with legislation mandating that all TV programs are broadcast with captions. Now, Canada’s media regulator, the Canadian Radio–television Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), has announced that all TV commercials, sponsorship messages and promos will have to be captioned from 1 September 2014.

While captioning on all English and French language TV programs has been compulsory in Canada since 2007, the new rules mean that it will become the first country in the world where 100% of broadcast content has to be captioned.

The onus will be on the advertisers to caption their commercials, with the Television Bureau of Canada announcing that, once the rules take effect, all advertising content will be screened to ensure it has closed captions before being cleared for broadcast.


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Canadian counterpart honoured with Jubilee Medal

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The CEO of our sister organisation, Media Access Canada, Beverley Milligan has been awarded with the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal.  The medal recognises the enormous contribution Milligan has made to the lives of Canadians with sensory impairment.  Over 20 years, Milligan has been a pivotal force in making closed captions a guarantee on Canadian TV.

In the 1990s, as the founder of Canada Captions Inc, Milligan applied a corporate sponsorship model to captioning so that advertisers could sponsor the provision of captions and receive a “closed captions provided by…” credit for their efforts. This system is still in place in Canada and the USA and has helped Canada achieve 100 per cent captioning across TV networks.


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Ofcom extends access requirements to programs made for Europe

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The British communications regulator, Ofcom, has decided to extend the access requirements it places on UK broadcasters to channels providing services to other countries in Europe.

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.


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