MeAC – Measuring Progress of eAccessibility in Europe

Legislation/regulations

Analogue TV

The Broadcasting Services Act 1992 set obligations for captioning of programming. Under Schedule 4 of the Act, all primetime programmes and all news and current affairs programmes outside of primetime must be captioned.

Further to these legal obligations, under the Disability Discrimination Act, the Human Rights Commission have negotiated with broadcasters that 55% of all programmes between 6am and midnight must be captioned, and that this would increase to 70% by December 2007. These quotas apply to both analogue and digital services. Quotas for captioning were also set for 20 subscription TV channels. The channels were required to caption 5% of output with a 5% increment each year. A Government inquiry was announced to investigate the developments in captioning and other access technologies by the end of 2008.

There is no legislation or regulation on audio description and none is provided by the major free-to-air networks. In February 2007, the Human Rights Commission chaired a meeting with stakeholders to improve access to DVDs through audio description and captioning.

Digital TV

FThe quotas for analogue TV have applied to free-to-air digital TV. Also, the Broadcasting Legislation Amendment (Digital Television) Act 2006 removes the exemption “as far as practicable”. This means that captioning is required on, for example, all news items including live segments.

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