DEAFNESS COUNCIL WESTERN AUSTRALIA INC

SUBMISSION TO HUMAN RIGHTS AND EQUAL OPPORTUNITY COMMISSION CAPTIONED OF TELEVISION BROADCASTS

The Deafness Council Western Australia welcomes the inquiry by the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission.

The Deafness Council notes the previous inquiry in 1998 and the materials and submissions referred to in the notice of inquiry.

The Deafness Council has the following comments on the specific points in which the Acting Commissioner has expressed particular interest.

It is a matter of law whether the Broadcasting Services Act displaces the legal application of the Disability Discrimination Act. Unless the DDA has been over ridden, the Acting Commissioner should continue to apply the DDA to television broadcasts,

The Deafness Council considers that the Broadcasting Services Act standards, when available, will provide minimum standards and should not be accepted as providing an appropriate remedy generally. What is required is for television broadcasters to develop plans that address provision of captioning of all television at all times. Anything less that complete caption coverage of all television broadcasts will provide deaf people with inferior access to television than is provided to other Australian citizens.

At present only some forms of television broadcast provide captions. SBS and community television in Western Australia do not provide closed captions and in general only provide open captions of foreign language broadcasts,

The scope of the television captioning inquiry needs to include pay television and data casting as well as free to air television. Pay television generally does not include captions.

The requirement for captioning should be that all television is captioned at all times. If closed captioning is not technically possible then the broadcast should have open captions.

Ideally, open captioning should be preferred over closed captioning, with closed captioning an acceptable alternative.

Open captions will appear on all television sets that are tuned to that broadcast. Closed captions are only available if the television set includes a decoder. Each deaf person watches a number of different television sets during their life, and many do not include decoders. For example hire television sets for hospital patients and television sets in hotel and motel rooms rarely include decoders.

The transmission of closed captions is often poorer than the transmission of the broadcast. It is a frequent experience of users of closed captions that the captions are received only intermittently and are garbled, or at not received at all.

There is a need for the television industry to ensure that closed captions are as robust and reliable as the broadcast itself and that all television sets sold include a decoder.

Full captioning of all television and mandatory inclusion of decoders in all new sets sold must be the objective unless undue hardship is shown in particular cases.

As an analogy, it would not be acceptable if public transport was provided on the basis that only peak hour busses and trains will be accessible to people in wheel chairs. Equally there would be community outrage if only half the public buildings in a city were accessible, and none of the sporting venues or child care centres. It would not be acceptable to the community if community centres were not accessible to people in wheelchairs, and it must not be accepted that community television is not accessible to deaf and hearing impaired people. The HREOC must not accept less than full captioning of television and inclusion of decoders in all new television sets and all sets that are provided for public or customer viewing unless the industry establishes undue hardship. The HREOC should encourage the industry to prepare and implement plans to provide full caption coverage and should allow reasonable time for this.