 Finance
 Management awareness of need and value
 Audience measurement tools
 Skill set by creative staff
 Equipment availability for production and delivery
 Lack of unique worldwide standards
 Lack of benchmarks of ‘goodness’.
 Broadcasters today are faced with ever diminishing incomes.
 Somehow, someway, everything has to be paid for.
 PSM Broadcasters have to make difficult choices about how best to
meet their public services obligations. Should they better serve ethnic
minorities, minorities with disabilities, or others? What do you think?
 Estimates about how much extra cost is incurred by including access
services are wildly different – they are as much as ten to one
different. It may depend on how much you want or don’t want the
bother of providing them?
 How can we get to the bottom/truth of this?
 For most managers in the media, access services for those
with disabilities is completely ‘off their radar screen’.
 Managers are concerned with short term survival. ‘Where
will I find the money for my next production’ is the important
issue for them.
 The longer term, or ways of helping society, are usually put on
the agenda of the ‘next’ meeting .
 How can we change this?
Who can change this?
 It’s hard to know how many people use access services when
they are provided.
 Its hard to know how much value they are
 More information is becoming available about which services
are the most valuable and most used from Projects like
DTV4ALL.
 More thought is needed about easy and simple monitoring of
use.
 This should be very easy to devise with web delivered
services – we can know who watches what, when and for how
long.
 It’s not ‘a piece of cake’ to provide ‘good’ access services.
 Staff need to know how to construct sub-titles, particularly
those that describe action in the screen.
 There is an ‘art’ in preparing good audio descriptions. They
need skills like unobtrusive intonation, concise and
imaginative scene description capability. Each must work in
the national language concerned.
 Staff need training and there are few, if any, national
language training schools. Could we get someone to start
one up?
 In some countries there is training available, but its by no
means universal..
Equipment availability
 The manufacturing community is moving forward with
including features for those with disabilities in receivers.
 Globally, this is painfully slow.
 One of the problems is that if you introduce features for those
with disabilities in a new set, what do you do for the millions of
those with disabilities who have the older models without the
features?
 Should governments make receivers with features for those
with disabilities free of charge? If so, who would pay for
them?
 It is simple economics of scale to see that the more people
that use the same standard, the cheaper will be the system.
 Yet the different developed countries perpetually develop their
own systems.
 How can we change this? Can the new ITU Focus Group
help? We hope so.
 No one has any really good idea of what constitutes ‘enough’
access services.
 A few countries have national quotas for subtitling and audio
descriptions, but only a few.
 The UN Resolution on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities
is vague and unclear about what are ‘reasonable measures’.
 The ITU may be able to help with guidelines for interpreting
the Resolution. Let’s encourage them to do so.
 The European Commission is mapping their Audiovisual
Media Services Directive against the UN Convention. This
way they can be more specific in their dealings with national
legislation.
 Maybe the biggest hope for the future of access services lies
with hybrid systems. This will help with the flexibility of
subtitles and get around the bandwidth problems for opt-in
visual signing. The basics of subtitling and audio description
are already in place in DVB standards.
 The TV or radio receiving system remains the same, but the
TV set or radio set includes internet connectivity.
 If the access services are now provided by the broadband
web, no new or additional, or unusual, equipment is needed.
The same equipment is needed for everyone, with or without
disabilities.
 Hybrid Television. Media content from broadcast and
broadband can be combined on the same screen, or the
display can display separate content from either.
 The Two Screen television experience. The
viewer who wants and needs it can watch independent
services on a laptop, tablet, or smart phone.
 Hybrid Radio. Radio sets that are so equipped can readily
hop to web content about the radio show, and the two can be
a combined experience.
 The new ITU-T Focus Group has a large and important task,
and needs much support and encouragement.
 There are many barriers to be overcome before we see the
kind of access services that those with disabilities deserve
widely available.
 One of the brightest hopes is to make use of hybrid
technologies..but how long will it be before they are widely
available, and will the great fragmentation of standards and
systems hold back their success?