Abstracts

Peter Olaf Looms, Chairman of ITU-T Focus Group on Audiovisual Media Accessibility (FG AVA)
“Making Television accessible in Africa and the role of ITU-T FG AVA”

Television is a young medium in Africa that has spread across the continent since the fifties to supplement and, in some cases, replace radio as the most ubiquitous medium. 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.

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 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.

Going digital means that we can use some of the bandwidth we save – the digital dividend - to offer access services which viewers themselves can select and use:

- Subtitles to make programmes in the national language accessible to help viewers understand what is being said

- Same-language subtitles to help viewers with hearing impairments understand what is being said

- Audio description and spoken subtitles to help viewers with visual impairments or reading difficulties

- Sign language to help persons who were born deaf understand what is going on

As there is not a strong business case for offering access services, legislation and regulation will be needed to promote change. The case for introducing and scaling-up access services across Africa requires awareness-building and consensus among all the key stakeholders involved in media to make change a reality.

For change to happen, there needs to be a shared vision of television accessibility. When that is in place, an analysis of the current situation in each territory will reveal a number of obstacles and barriers that need to be addressed. The results of the analysis can then be translated into a strategy for television accessibility and a roadmap of actions that will be needed to make the vision a reality.

This is what the International Telecommunications Union is currently working on. A report on Television Accessibility is soon to be released. The ITU-T Focus Group on Audiovisual Media Accessibility held its first meeting in May 2011 and plans to release deliverables before the end of 2011 that culminate in a roadmap by the end of next year.

Xiaoya Yang, ITU-T/TSB, Head, WTSA Programme Division
“The ITU-T Focus Group on Audiovisual Media Accessibility (FG AVA): an overview”

Late in 2010, ITU organized jointly with the European Broadcasting Union a workshop on “Accessibility to Broadcasting and IPTV ACCESS for ALL”. Few months later ITU-T launched a new group of work called Focus Group on Audiovisual Media Accessibility. This group of experts is open to all interested parties, to bring together the requirements and systems across all the different media platforms – Internet, IPTV, and Broadcasting. The aim is to unify access system technologies across the world and across all media.