ITU Workshop on
“Making Media Accessible to all:
The options and the economics”
(Geneva, Switzerland, 24 (p.m.) – 25 October 2013)
TV Accessibility in China:
The Current Situation, Challenges
and Actions
Dongxiao Li
Zhejiang University, China
ldongxiao@126.com
Geneva, Switzerland, 25 October 2013
1. Audience demographics
There are 13 million visually-impaired
persons in China (0.1% of total)
Annual growth: 450,000 blind and 1.35
million low-vision individuals.
27.8 million persons in China have
serious hearing impairments (2.1%)
Annual growth: 30,000 are born deaf,
30-50,000 suffer serious hearing
impairments.
2. TV Viewing and Disability
Survey of needs in eastern China 2010
TV is still the most widely-used
medium, used by
87.9% of the hearing impaired and
86.6% of the visually impaired
TV is one of the few sources of
information in their daily life
if provided with subtitles (for viewers
with hearing impairments)
Geneva, Switzerland, 24 October 2013
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2. TV Viewing and Disability
The most-watched genres are News, TV
documentaries & Entertainment.
The main motives are information, ‘education’ in
its broad sense and to kill time with entertainment.
Most viewers with disabilities spend 1-3 hours on
TV primarily during prime time (6–10 pm).
More than ninety percent of respondents with
hearing disabilities indicate that they need
subtitles to understand TV content better, in
particular news programs.
Respondents show modest satisfaction with
Chinese TV programs
Persons with visual impairments are more
satisfied than viewers with hearing impairments
Geneva, Switzerland, 25 October 2013
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3: Access services - TV Captioning
In the TV programming analyzed:
More than half of the TV programs (56.6%) had
captioning
Captioning figures were lowest for news & sports,
especially live news and sports events.
CCTV-13 (News Channel) 24.3%.
CCTV-5 (Sports Channel) 1.7%.
Captioning highest for TV series and cartoons.
Live broadcasts constitute a serious challenge for
captioning in China.
Geneva, Switzerland, 25 October 2013
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3: Access services - TV Captioning
All TV captioning in China is currently ’open’.
No Closed Captioning (CC) has been available to
date.
There are technical reasons for this (no CC
capability in analogue or digital terrestrial TV).
The increasing availability of Integrated
Broadcast/Broadband TVs (also known as Smart or
Connected TVs) will remove this technical barrier.
Geneva, Switzerland, 25 October 2013
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A TV Documentary with Captions
4: Sign language on TV
China currently has 1,300 TV channels
Approximately 150 broadcast sign-language
programs. (11.5%).
Most sign language programs are on local TV
channels.
The main TV genre with sign-language is TV news
(80% of the total are ten-minute news bulletins).
Since October 22 2011 CCTV has been broadcasting
‘Gontong Guanzhu’ (Common Concern) with signlanguage interpretation.
Nearly all sign-language programs show the sign
language in a small window at the bottom of the
main screen.
Geneva, Switzerland, 25 October 2013
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Gong Tong Guan Zhu (CCTV News)
5: Audio Description (AD) on TV
There is currently no AD on TV
in mainland China - but there are
some trials using films.
AD is offered in Hong Kong and
Taiwan.
Our study showed that very few
people had ever heard of AD.
Geneva, Switzerland, 25 October 2013
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6: Legislation
In 2008 April, the Chinese government
promulgated ‘the People's Republic of China Law
on the Protection of Disabled Persons’ within the
framework of the United Nations Convention on
the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.
There are TV accessibility provisions in the law that
the local governments and social organizations
should take measures to promote TV accessibility,
including producing sign-language TV programs,
broadcasting features about disabled people and
promoting subtitles in TV programs and films.
Geneva, Switzerland, 25 October 2013
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7. Challenges
Only open captioning in TV programs;
no Closed Captioning.
No captioning on live TV programs;
technical challenges to produce them.
No AD service in Chinese TV programs
to date;
The quality of sign-language programs
is low; sign-language provisions do not
match the needs of intended audience.
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8. Actions - What are we doing?
Making the case for action:
Research: team, projects, funds, areas;
Investigation: Documenting the needs of
hearing and visually-impaired viewers
Conference: Media-accessibility
workshop(Hangzhou,2012) to raise
awareness
Cooperation: inter-universities;
governments; social organization;
international level; knowledge-sharing
Proof of concept:
Running a pilot in Zhejiang Province
Geneva, Switzerland, 25 October 2013
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Thank you for listening!
Dongxiao LI
Lecturer
College of Media
& International Culture
Zhejiang University
Hangzhou
People's Republic of China
E-mail: <ldongxiao@126.com>
Geneva, Switzerland, 25 October 2013
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