Media Access Australia does not directly provide captioning, transcription or audio description (AD) services to organisations for TV, video and/or online. We don't have the internal resources to do the work and instead concentrate on advocating for web and digital inclusion for people with disability. However, we do know who does this work.
We've listed some popular questions concerning TV and provided corresponding answers to try and assist you.
Which suppliers can I contact for captioning, AD or transcription?
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.
Make sure that the problem you are experiencing is not caused by poor reception (scrambled captions on more than one channel are a typical example of this). For more information, go to the captioning problems section of this website.
When making a complaint about captions, make sure you give enough information for the network to investigate it properly. You should
The way people watch TV programs and other video content has changed rapidly over recent years. Many major broadcasters in Australia and other countries have introduced online catch-up TV services, consumers are watching TV on a wide range of devices, and video on demand services are making DVDs and Blu-ray disks obsolete.
The television audio description trial commenced on 5 August 2012 and continued for 13 weeks until 4 November, during which 14 hours of TV was audio described on ABC1 each week.
Here are some answers to questions that Media Access Australia has been asked about the trial. We will update these as more information comes to hand.
Audio description (AD) is a second audio track that can be turned on and off which describes the important visual elements of a program. It is essential for providing equal access for viewers who are blind or vision impaired. AD is widely available on television overseas but is yet to be offered in Australia.
Audio description services on television are now established in many countries. In 2012, a trial of audio description was conducted on ABC1 over 13 weeks.
There is currently no regular audio description service on television in Australia, or any policy or legislation for broadcasters to provide audio described programs. However, a trial of audio description commenced on ABC1 on 5 August 2012 and ran for 13 weeks. The trial was one of the recommendations of the final report from the Federal Government's Media Access Review.
According to Ken Crouch, General Manager of this Northern Rivers NSW based not-for-profit organisation, the seminar aims to “raise the quality of closed captioning and audio description across the film industry.”
