MeAC – Measuring Progress of eAccessibility in Europe

Legislation/regulations

Analogue TV

The Gasparri law encourages accessibility of programmes for disabled people. Through the law, an obligation was imposed on the public service broadcaster to adopt measures to protect disabled people (Article 4, para 2). In addition, the decree (DPR 19 September 1997 – Article 25, para 1) appears to make provision to support the availability of decoders and other accessibility measures for disabled viewers.

Digital TV

Italy is currently managing the transition to digital TV and appears to be moving towards digital switch-off by the EU cut-off date, but there has been no direct attention to accessibility in this context yet, apart from the apparent requirement in Resolution 216/00/CONS that decoders of digital video broadcasting be able to show teletext subtitles.

Other initiatives

The main policy for disabled consumers in relation to broadcasting is not based on legislation, but rather on the service contracts with the major public broadcaster which usually cover a couple of years. The contract signed in 2003 included requirements for subtitling, audio description and sign language. The last contract was assessed as unacceptable by disability associations which asked for a modification and for an intervention by Parliament. They obtained a modification of the contract and a commitment from the public service broadcaster for an increase of the accessible programming (15% per year for the period 2007-2009).

There are no obligations on the private TV broadcasters regarding this issue but there have been some voluntary initiatives (e.g. some broadcasters sometimes provide subtitling on teletext service, but not on a general basis; the same is the case for sign language interpretation).

To avoid SPAM-abuse of the e-mail address the ‘@’ sign was written as ‘a t’ and each dot ‘.’ as ‘d o t’.
Please change the recipient address of your message accordingly. We apologize for this inconvenience.