Captions are of great assistance to people who have diminished hearing, people whose first language is not English or spoken, and anyone who wants to follow webcasts and TV broadcasts proceedings in noisy environments.
Governments and their agencies:
All webcasts and television advrertytiensbtsmust carry captions so that all citizens may participate in democratic processes, debates, alerts and advertisements.
Webcasts:
Webcasts should always have captions because the sound is very often not of say the standard of a television broadcast. People often access webcasts in noisy places like public transport, airports, etc.
Television:
- Free to Air channels must be 100% captioned 24 hours a day (currently 0600 to 2400).
- Multi-channel platforms (ABC2, 7Mate, etc.) must caption their programs to the same standard as free to air channels. Many programs bought from overseas for the purpose of multi-channel screenings arrive already captioned but these captions are not displayed in Australia.
- Each channel on subscription television must have a common, minimum captioning quota.
- The current “readability, comprehensibility and accuracy, so that they are meaningful to viewers” captioning quality standard is subjective. Captioning quality standards should be metric based.