Closed Captioning assists deaf and hearing impaired people access television programs.
Closed Captioning is the text presentation of dialogue and other relevant sounds such as laughter and music that appear on screen as part of the program content.
Provisions relating to closed captioning are outlined in the relevant ASTRA codes of practice for subscription broadcast television; subscription narrowcast television and open narrowcast industries in Australia.
Subscription television assists the deaf and hearing impaired by captioning thousands of hours of television content on over 40 channels across all programming genres. There is no extra cost to subscribers for captioning services on subscription television platforms.
Policy Developments
In 2010, the Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy tabled the Media Access Review final report ’Access to Electronic Media for the Hearing and Vision-Impaired‘. The final report contains 22 recommendations to improve audio description and caption levels in Australia. ASTRA is currently in consultations with the Government regarding proposed captioning legislation, and is involved in consultations with the ACMA regarding captioning quality guidelines. Legislation to implement new captioning requirements is expected to be introduced into Parliament in 2012.
Further information on the Media Access Review can be found on the DBCDE website.