Working party on pay television captioning
Second meeting: 27 August 2001
The Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission convened a second meeting on 5 November of a working party to discuss possibilities for captioning on pay television in Australia to improve access for deaf and hearing impaired people.
The meeting was chaired by HREOC Deputy Disability Discrimination Commissioner Graeme Innes.
The meeting agreed on the following proposal
- The Australian Subscription Television and Radio Association's (ASTRA) internal working group on captioning will put a proposed plan for captioning on pay television services to ASTRA's February 2002 Board meeting.
- ASTRA will consult with disability representatives on HREOC's pay television captioning group and with the Australian Caption Centre in preparation of this plan, and will advise them of the content of the plan to be submitted, subject to any commercial in confidence issues for ASTRA members.
- The Australian Caption Centre will assist ASTRA for this purpose by providing information as soon as possible regarding availability of captioned material.
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: Dr 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)