Broadcasting
Legislation/regulations
Analogue TV
There is no national legislation related to the accessibility of the media or TV. In general, regulation of broadcasting media traditionally falls under the responsibility of the Länder. They agree on common principles by means of a ‘national broadcasting treaty’. The treaty addresses generic principles such as financing rules, protection of minorities and so on. Based on these generic principles, the Länder implement their own regulation. The current national broadcasting treaty came into force on 1st March, 2007 and does not make any reference to accessibility of broadcasting TV programmes for people with disabilities.
Some Länder have introduced disability equality legislation that regulates the accessibility of broadcast TV, in particular in Bavaria, Berlin/Brandenburg, Hessen and Northrhine-Westfalia. These regulations are formulated in a ‘soft’ manner. They specify that the public broadcasters should consider accessibility within the bounds of possibility; no concrete quota or targets have been stipulated.
Consequently, the availability of programmes with access services including text captions, sign language and audio description is rather scattered across the country, largely confined to programs broadcasted by public broadcasters.
In 2000, the Committee of Labour and Social Affairs of the German Parliament recommended that the federal government and the state governments should work together towards an improved provision of broadcast content to deaf, hard of hearing, blind, and visually impaired people, in particular in relation to subtitling, sign language description and audio description.
Digital TV
It appears that there are no legislative, regulatory or other accessibility activities in Germany for digital TV.
Other initiatives
The ARD is a federation of regional broadcasters that jointly provide a nationwide program. In 2005/2006, the ARD showed 80 television films and 20 motion pictures with audio description. Phoenix – a special interest channel jointly run by several public broadcasters – broadcasts daily news with sign language.
The Bayerische Rundfunk (Bavarian Broadcasting Station) is one of nine German state-level public broadcasters. It runs two programmes dedicated to disabled people:
- “TV for the hearing impaired” offers videotext subtitling of about 60 programmes per month and a dedicated weekly 30 minute TV programme addressing the hearing impaired called “Sehen statt Hören” (seeing instead of listening) broadcast with both sign language description and subtitling. The programme has been on air for more than 25 years
- “TV for the blind” exists since 1997 and offers audio-description of selected programmes
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