Closed Captions

Television General Television Topics
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ACMA remakes TV captioning standard following review

Following a comprehensive review into the quality of TV captions, the ACMA has made the Broadcasting Services (Television Captioning) Standard 2023. This replaces the Broadcasting Services (Television Captioning) Standard 2013, which was due to sunset on 1 October 2023.

This standard is designed to assist viewers who are deaf or hard of hearing, by setting requirements for Australian free-to-air TV and subscription TV broadcasters to provide program captioning that is readable, accurate and comprehensible.

After undertaking research and consulting with stakeholders, the ACMA concluded the existing rules were operating effectively to deliver meaningful captions for deaf or hard of hearing viewers. As such, the standard has been remade without substantial changes.

In response to feedback we received during the review, new captioning compliance guidelines will also be developed to give broadcasters and viewers a clearer understanding of how the ACMA applies the rules.

A draft version of the guidelines is expected to be released later this year for public consultation.

The ACMA will also be engaging with representatives from the broadcasting industry and the deaf and hard of hearing community over the coming months to discuss other captioning issues raised during the review, including how a metric measurement model trial could be conducted.

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24

ACMA seeking feedback on draft captioning guidelines

The ACMA is seeking feedback on new draft captioning quality guidelines designed to give broadcasters and their viewers a clearer understanding of how the ACMA assesses the quality of television captioning.

The draft guidelines address captioning quality matters where stakeholders have previously requested clarification.

These matters include how the ACMA assesses captioning provided on television shows that have distinct program segments – such as news or current affairs, whether captions must be in a particular font or colour, and how soon captions must appear on screen after the corresponding audio.

The draft guidelines have been developed in response to feedback the ACMA has received from broadcasters during investigations and audits, and in response to the recent consultation undertaken before the Broadcasting Services (Television Captioning) Standard was remade.

The draft captioning guidelines can be downloaded from the ACMA website.

The ACMA is seeking feedback about whether the draft guidelines sufficiently explain the interpretation of the captioning quality rules, and if there are any other matters interested parties would like to be included. The deadline for submissions is 5pm Monday 11 December 2023.

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The question was raised this week at the Driving Change disability employment summit at Bondi Beach Pavilion.

Joanna Agius, founder of Deaf Aboriginal Services, said, “In regards to NITV, there’s been a lot of deaf Aboriginal people in the community use it. But unfortunately, a couple of years ago, there were no captions. There was no access for First Nations deaf community. So we often try to contact them to ask them to add captions, and again, their response is funding. Of course, we all know funding is a big barrier for us.

“A lot of hearing people don’t include people with disabilities. I’d be really surprised to see if there’s any inclusivity or spotlight for First Nations people with disability on TV. A lot of hearing people focus on culture. It’s very important for us to see that representation. However, there’s no shift for First Nations people with disability or people who are deaf.”

Agius concluded by saying there were two avenues that needed addressing by NITV.

“One is accessibility, like captions, audio transcriptions. And there’s no First Nationsactors who are brought in, or reporters, or anything like that. So it’s just interesting… there’s still a lot of gaps everywhere,” she said.

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26

And some captions, particularly on ‘live’ programming are not very good, particularly with sport. They are often wrong, and/or five seconds behind the audio/visuals.

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27

I think a good addition to TVs would be an in-built app that adds AI captions on the fly to anything being watched. Even if not super accurate it would be of some benefit. (Could also translate foreign languages).

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That could help, would obviously require translation in the cloud using eg. Google Translate, would still be a bit of lag, but be less than what is currently being done by services like AI-Media. But would be more likely to get names wrong etc. Can’t wait to see what the Roosters player Mark Nawaqanitawase name will look like in a closed caption!

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For live sporting matches in Australia like AFL and NRL, I think the captioners will have a starting team list by their side so they can input player names accurately.

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Yes, that’s what I mean when I say local services like AI Media will be more likely to get names correct compared to a cloud service like Google.

But still, there’s a chance that the AI-Media system will misinterpret it and it will require manual correction - I’ve seen that happen a lot.

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Watching (not listening) something yesterday and wondering who Ellen James was. Turned out to be Allan Jones :thinking:

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32

From the ‘When Captions Fail Spectacularly’ file.

Kyrgios comes up as “each and curiosity” and 9Go is “9 Go Mad” :rofl:
(as Ros Kelly was referencing the United Cup broadcast)

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I would go mad, but not for something Nine did.

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Caption fail on YT :smiley:

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Actually, the YT automated captions are usually pretty good, better than the the live captioning that free to air does. And it’s much closer to the audio feed, not 5-10 seconds behind.

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You can probably forgive live captions for sport etc, but the 7 Canberra noodle updates (all pre recorded of course) just then was missing basic sentence structure like spaces. I think they really should be of a better standard than this.

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38

Speaking of Seven, why are Melbourne updates still using the all capitals captions? It looks so ugly.

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39

Sydney does it too.

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40

Just had a thought, why did the acma choose to continue using Teletext for subtitles when we switched to DVB-T instead of DVB Captioning? It’s not like we still have an active Teletext system so wouldn’t the broadcasters have to do extra work to keep it active? Plus, DVB Captioning has always looked clearer on TVs I’ve seen in Europe because unlike Teletext, I believe DVB Captioning sends a bitmap of the captions in the stream of each multiplex, and then the TV decides it using its own font, so you don’t get weird looking characters like Teletext.

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41

But what area was this recorded in?

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I’m down in Cooma tonight, on a road trip across the Snowys through to Albury today and then over the Victorian Alps (Mt Hotham down to Lakes Entrance).