ACAG, assembled in 2010 by the Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs, oversees and advises on the implementation of accessible screens, and the outcomes of the meeting have been released in a second communiqué to the public.
The communiqué is reproduced below.
The policy requires all feature films applying for Screen Australia investment to be audio described from July 2011, complementing Screen Australia’s access requirement since 2007 for captioning of feature films.
The new condition complements Screen Australia’s requirement, introduced in 2007, for all feature films to be captioned.
This initiative follows recommendations from the Federal Government’s Media Access Review final report, in order to provide around 600,000 Australians who are blind or vision impaired with access to audio described feature films.
The Broadway Accessibility/Audience Expansion Initiative enables theatregoers to view captions or listen to audio description at every performance of designated shows.
Using technology developed by Sound Associates, the G-PASSaccess services of I-Caption and D-Scriptive are both automated systems, delivering captions or audio description that are synchronised to the show’s cueing system.
