Working party on pay television captioning
First meeting: 27 August 2001
The Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission convened a first meeting on 27 August of a working party to discuss possibilities for expanding captioning on pay television in Australia so as to improve access for deaf and hearing impaired people.
The meeting was chaired by HREOC Deputy Disability Discrimination Commissioner Graeme Innes. Contacts for people interested in contributing views or information are:
Consumer input:
Deafness Forum of Australia: Brian Rope (dfa1@ozemail.com.au)
Australian Association of the Deaf: Karen Lloyd (aad@aad.org.au)
Deafness Council of Western Australia: John Byrne (JohnBy@calm.wa.gov.au)
Industry input:
Australian Subscription Radio and Television Association: Debra Richards (richardd@astra.org.au). Representatives of each of the major pay TV platforms, Austar, Foxtel and Optus are also participating. The meeting was also attended by Odyssey, one of the pay TV content providers.
Captioning service provider input:
Australian Caption Centre: Robert Scott (rscott@auscap.com.au)
Government:
HREOC representatives: Deputy Commissioner Innes; Mr David Mason (disabdis@humanrights.gov.au)
Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts: Serena
Beresford-Wylie (Serena.Beresford-Wylie@dcita.gov.au)
Participants confirmed that at present the only captioned programs on pay television are the captioned programs of free to air broadcasters retransmitted on cable services, together with the subtitled material on the World Movies channel.
Community representatives emphasised the desire of deaf and hearing impaired people to have an effective choice of subscribing to and benefiting from pay television services and noted the provisions of the Disability Discrimination Act.
Industry representatives provided information on some barriers to captioning (additional to those faced by free to air providers) in terms of cost constraints for an industry still working towards achieving profitability, bandwidth constraints for captioning over satellite services, and substantial incompatibility of existing cable service infrastructure with carriage of closed captions.
All parties agreed on the need to work to find a way forward.
Consumer representatives and the Australian Caption Centre undertook to provide industry with any information available on potential markets represented by deaf and hearing impaired people and their families, and on community preferences on which programs might first be subject to captioning.
Industry representatives advised that they had established an internal working group on captioning which would further discuss options within existing technologies as well as prospects for captioning being more readily achievable once decisions were taken to move to digital transmission.
The working group will meet again within 2 months at a date to be fixed.