Australian Caption Centre - HREOC Issues Paper Comments

 

Demand and priorities for captioning

There are several studies available on the number of Deaf and hard of hearing people in Australia.

 

Financial barriers

To clarify the cost of captioning the SBS and ABC news services that were funded under a four year arrangement in 1997, the costing is:

Total annual allocation $1.75 million

Weekday bulletins SBS 2 bulletins for 5 days for 52 weeks = 520

Weekend bulletins SBS* 1 bulletin for 2 days for 52 weeks = 104

Weekday bulletins ABC 7 bulletins for 5 days for 52 weeks = 1,820

Weekend bulletins ABC# 6 bulletin for 2 days for 52 weeks = 624

Total bulletins 3,068

Cost per bulletin $570.40

 

NB: This cost per bulletin includes capitalisation of equipment used

* The World News at Nine bulletin is not broadcast on the weekends

# Darwin does not have its own bulletin on weekends

 

Experience in both Australia and overseas show that greater efficiencies result from a greater volume of captioning undertaken, this is particularly applicable to news and current affairs programs, where the bulletins often feature ‘updates’ of earlier stories. These updates require only minor adjustments to the previously captioned versions.

 

News captioning

The original timetable proposed by the Television Broadcasting Services (Digital Conversion) Act 1998 to caption all news and current affairs in capital city locations by 2001, and regional areas by 2004, is achievable. The Australian Caption Centre is currently training staff to meet these deadlines.

The actions of other organisations, such as the Seven Network, that has set-up a full live news captioning facility for its early evening news shows that it is feasible to plan and implement such a requirement. Similarly, Seven has worked out a system for converting its American, live via satellite, NBC Today program’s captions to teletext captions suitable for broadcast in Australia.

Rather than specifying that a particular method of captioning should be used by a service provider, standards should be set that ensure that the whole content of the bulletin is captioned as accurately as possible. For example, the Australian Caption Centre already uses a modified version of ENR to caption the ABC Evening News, Late Edition News, SBS World News and World News at Nine. This allows for excellent standards of captioning to be achieved, without the need for live, stenographic captioners. This system is particularly useful for major news bulletins where the whole bulletin is usually pre-scripted and pre-recorded.

The modified version of ENR can also be applied to regional and local stories, as many of these bulletins use stories sourced from elsewhere with a "local" introduction and sign-off. Thus the "main" stories could be supplied with captions. Presumably the pieces to camera are all scripted and again a caption file could be created at local level.

 

Sports captioning

Sport is captioned overseas, usually by a stenocaptioner operating from a remote location watching the sport on a monitor and providing the captions via a modem to the studio.

Some live sports are internationally broadcast, with an international commentary team (eg soccer, cricket, rugby league). It may therefore be possible to provide captions with these broadcasts and share the costs among the different broadcasters that use captions.

 

Other live material

It is possible to caption all live material, and this is done overseas. With the economies of captioning large amounts of live material, the relative cost for each individual program would be reduced compared to looking at the program in isolation.

 

Non-English language material

Subtitles do not provide the same level of information as captions. There is no colouring and positioning to denote who is speaking (which is needed if the viewer cannot see the mouth of the actor). Similarly, there are no sound effects or music information included which may be essential to the context of the scene (eg a telephone rings off-screen and the characters all turn to the sound which is rendered meaningless if the telephone ringing cannot be heard).

The Australian Caption Centre is working on different techniques to present captions along with subtitled programs to overcome any issues of cluttering of the screen.

The feedback that the Australian Caption Centre has had from the Deaf community, and organisations such as the National Working Party on Captioning, is that they are not particularly concerned about captioning foreign language news bulletins. Therefore, the Australian Caption Centre has not attempted to find suitably qualified captioners, or source caption files from overseas. There would be some additional problems in that teletext cannot support a wide range of character sets, particularly Asian characters.

 

Children’s television

The Australian Caption Centre has developed captioning standards for children ranging from pre-school to high school age. These have been developed in consultation with Deaf and hearing impaired people, teachers and education staff.

 

Music video

Music videos are captioned in America and are often used by hearing people as a source of lyrics. The American legislators only provide exemptions for music that is predominantly instrumental (ie no lyrics to caption).

Given that most music played in music videos is American or British in origin, it would be possible to source the American or British caption files, where they exist, and convert them for Australian use.

 

Quality of captioning and pass through of existing captions

Australian caption watchers enjoy some of the highest standards of captions in the world on domestically produced and captioned programs. These standards, which have been developed over many years in consultation with Deaf and hearing impaired viewers, should be maintained and encompassed in regulations. It is expected that this will be included as part of the Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts Review.

 

Responsibilities of producers

As markets open for film and television production in it makes sense to caption a program at the production stage in its life. The cost of captioning can then be amortised across sales to all markets.

 

 

Advertising

The Australian Caption Centre is lobbying the State and Territory Governments that do not have a captioning policy in place to introduce one. These States and Territories are: ACT, NT, SA, Qld and Tas.

For commercial advertising, the increase in the number of captioned programs, and people watching those programs with captions, makes the market more attractive to advertisers. There has been a significant increase in the number of advertisers who caption their television commercials.

 

Television receivers with caption decoder capacity

No additional comments from our original submission.

 

Videotape captioning

No additional comments from our original submission.

 

 

Self regulation: codes of practice

No additional comments from our original submission.

 

Market based approaches

No additional comments from our original submission.

 

DDA Standards

No particular comments.