International policy and legislation

As reported in York Region news, the channels are currently up for licence renewal, and CRTC has the power to revoke licenses if caption requirements are not met. At a hearing on 28 April, a representative from Channel Zero said that it had increased its captioning staff to six to provide captions for AOV Adult Movie Channel, AOV Action Clips, AOV Maleflixxx and two non-pornographic channels, and these were now all in full compliance.

Currently, about 20 per cent of programs on Dutch television are foreign language (mainly English), and these are usually broadcast with Dutch subtitles, providing a level of access for Deaf and hearing impaired viewers. In addition to this, there has been closed captioning available since teletext was introduced in 1980. Legislation required the NPO to provide closed captioning on 95% of the Dutch-language programs shown on its three channels, Netherlands 1, 2 and 3, by 2011.

Around the world copyright law, which protects the rights of authors, has inadvertently worked to restrict the number of publications which can be reproduced in braille and other alternative formats. The World Blind Union estimates that just 1-7% of all books published are made available to blind readers.

The white paper, which is the first in a planned series, was written by our Project manager for television, Chris Mikul, and sponsored by Red Bee Media Australia.