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Joint ITU - AICTO Workshop on "Interoperability of IPTV in the Arab region" hosted by Du |
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Dubai, United Arab Emirates, 20-21(AM) September 2011 |
Contact: tsbworkshops@itu.int |
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Abstracts |
Making IPTV Accessible
Mr. Peter Looms,
Chairman of the ITU-T Focus Group on
Audiovisual Media Accessibility
Television has been with us for less
than a century. It plays an important
role in informing, educating and
entertaining society and promoting
social cohesion. Even in the age of the
Internet and the mobile phone, TV is one
of the dominant media used by people
from all walks of life. In the last
decade, IPTV has emerged as a platform
to complement and, in some cases,
replace broadcast as a means to deliver
television content.
Not everyone finds it easy to enjoy TV,
however. Worldwide, at least one in six
has some kind of problem watching TV.
There are the well-known challenges –
persons who are blind or deaf – and also
some less well-known groups of people
who have problems. They include:
• Persons who are part of a subsistence
economy and cannot afford receivers for
whom the mobile phone may be their first
experience of owning IT
• Citizens in countries with several
national or local languages
• Viewers who are poor readers (either
because they have visual or cognitive
impairments or because they never
learned to read well when they were
kids)
• Persons with health or age-related
difficulties when watching TV which
include reading text on screen, hearing
what is said or using a remote control
The switch from analogue to digital
broadcast, Internet/IPTV or mobile
distribution in the coming 10-15 years
and the ubiquitous nature of mobile
phones provide new opportunities to make
media accessible. At the same time they
create new accessibility challenges.
This presentation briefly addresses the
main challenges of making IPTV
accessible. It outlines the main groups
of persons with disabilities and
identifies the kinds of access services
that can be offered.
As IPTV continues to grow, the case for
introducing and scaling-up IPTV access
services requires awareness-building and
consensus among all the key stakeholders
to make change a reality. As there is
not a strong business case for offering
access services, legislation and
regulation will be needed to promote
change.
This is what the International
Telecommunications Union is currently
working on. A report entitled “Making
Television Accessible” is in press and
will soon to be released. The ITU-T
Focus Group on Audiovisual Media
Accessibility has begun work in this
field and plans to release deliverables
before the end of 2011 that culminate in
a roadmap for assuring accessible
digital media including IPTV by the end
of 2012. |
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