Canada is the first country to make the captioning of commercials and promos compulsory, and is thus the first country to achieve what is in effect 100% captioning on TV broadcasts. While the voluntary captioning of commercials is common in Australia and many other countries, captioning of promos is very rare.
The conference, being run at Swinburne University’s Hawthorn campus from 9-11 July, tackles a diverse range of issues in the media and communication space, including issues around disability and media access.
Last year, 51 countries signed the treaty, which will give blind and vision impaired people greater access to works in accessible formats like braille and audio. Currently, due to copyright restrictions, only between 1 and 7 percent of the world’s published books are made available in these formats.
The report gives percentage scores for the accuracy of 21 news, sport and discussion programs which were captioned live. The scores were obtained using the NER Model developed by Pablo Romero Fresco of Roehampton University and Juan Martinez of the University of Barcelona.
The comment will help the FCC produce a report on the extent to which communication technologies are accessible, ongoing accessibility barriers of these technologies, as well as recordkeeping and enforcement of accessibility requirements.
The FCC is required to produce a report every two years on the level of industry compliance with the accessibility requirements of the Twenty-First Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act 2010 (CVAA).
In Europe, the European Blind Union (EBU) has issued a warning that the European Commission’s pledge — Directive 2004/18/EC — to make all public websites and websites providing basic services to citizens accessible by 2015 is slipping behind schedule.
The EBU claims that EU Ministers have not held any meaningful discussions on the directive since June 2013.
Measuring caption quality is an emerging field, with many different systems being tried around the world. Ai-Media’s audit was scored using the NER (Number, Edition error and Recognition error) system developed by Pablo Romero-Fresco and Juan Martinez. This model recognises that different kinds of errors have different impacts and therefore the quality measure should take this into account.
The seminar, which was first held in 2007, is organised by the TransMedia Catalonia Research Group and the EU project HBB4ALL (Hybrid Broadcast Broadband For All) and is partially funded by the Spanish government. It “aims to bring together practitioners and researchers in order to advance the knowledge of current Audio Description (AD) practices and research”.
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.
Broadcasters are required to measure quality in sample of programs from three genres: news, entertainment and chat shows. The dimensions of quality to be measured are:
