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ACMA logo
ACMA is a statutory authority within the federal government portfolio of Communications and the Arts, and is Australia's national regulator for broadcasting, the internet, telecommunications, and radiocommunications.
Media access refers to how digital, web and broadcast content can be used, read or viewed by people with disabilities, particularly those who are blind, vision impaired, Deaf, hearing impaired, or who have a cognitive condition or mobility disability. This includes the provision of effective access to websites, online information, digital communications, streaming services and broadcast television, as well as access in the classroom, cinema and the arts.
By the end of 2014 the major cinema chains of Hoyts, Village, Event, and Reading cinemas had rolled out around 240 accessible screens across 130 cinemas around the country. This was part of the Commonwealth Government’s Cinema Access Implementation Plan that saw every major chain cinema complex in the country have accessibility services on at least one screen per venue.
The major cinema chains of Hoyts, Event, Village and Reading should have closed captions (CC) and audio description (AD) available at all locations across Australia, with open captions (OC) available at select major and independent locations and AD and CC available at New South Wales and Victorian Palace Cinema locations. Finding movie sessions which have these features can be difficult. Here is our step-by-step guide to finding movie sessions with CC, OC and AD on each major cinema website.
A few things to remember:
Media Access Australia does not provide captioning, transcribing or audio description services. However, there are a number of access suppliers that provide these services for video, TV, events, websites and online broadcasting in Australia.
ACMA logo
ACMA requested submissions from the public in June 2016, and the issues it looked at during the review included captioning rules for multichannels, the framework for granting captioning exemptions and target reductions to broadcasters, along with the complexity of rules for captioning on subscription television services.
The findings of ACMA’s report include:
Facebook is a popular social networking tool that allows users to create a personal profile, add other users as friends, exchange messages, and share information and media. Facebook also allows members to participate in interest groups, follow particular organisations and play simple online games.
Dashboard of CADET being used
CADET has taken over two years to develop from the initial beta test, and is the result of a mix of grant funding and crowd-funding from an Indiegogo campaign launched in late 2015. It is a free, downloadable caption-authoring software tool that can also be used to generate audio-description scripts.
Video sharing service Vimeo added closed caption functionality back in 2014, and creating a caption file and adding it to the videos you upload is simple.
To add captions to a video on Vimeo, you will first need a caption file. You can engage a professional captioning company to create a file, or use one of the do-it-yourself captioning sites. There are a number of tools which allow you to create captions from scratch which can then be added to YouTube videos.
YouTube is a popular way to share videos online. Providing captions on videos makes them accessible to a wider audience, including Deaf and hearing impaired users. Captions also help to increase the search ranking of a video so that it is more easily discovered through search engines.
