There is no doubt about it. Our New Zealand captioning service for free to air Television on Channels one, two and three, do a stellar job. Without them, thousands of people like myself would not have access to television viewing at all.
Captioning is not used just by the Deaf community. Most people with any type of hearing impairment uses this captioning service on Teletext page 801. And it’s not just Deaf or deaf people that are using it, but also the elderly, people with English as a second language, and I’ve also heard that people with other disabilities find captions make their viewing much easier too.
With the advent of digital television, it was very worrying that we might lose this service when TVNZ phased out Teletext altogether in 2011/2012. However, the Deaf Aotearoa has now been advised that TVNZ sees that it is important to continue with the captioning service, so long as NZ On Air continue to fund this.
That’s a huge relief.
But I see this as just a beginning. This should not be an endpoint for this wonderful service, but a point where we can start lobbying and improving what we already have.
I see a number of core outstanding issues. They are…
- Sky TV
- DVD captioning
- Laws
- Captions on TV OnDemand
- Maori TV/Prime
Sky Television..
Let’s face it. When we travel to any other country like USA, UK, Ireland and even Australia. Sky TV has captioning as part of the service. We don’t. I’d like to see Sky provide this service for us. I personally don’t subscribe to Sky for this very reason, and I’m sure a lot of others don’t as well. Do they not see Deaf or deaf people as part of their customer base?
DVD Captioning.
I already don’t go to movies as I miss too much of the dialogue. Instead I have to wait for 4-6 months for the movie to come out on DVD. A few years ago it was a given that the DVD’s would be captioned and so it was never a problem. These days, you have to check very carefully, as now many of them aren’t coming with subtitles or captioning on them. There is nothing so disappointing than arriving home with a DVD, ice-cream, lollies and having your own theatre experience at home, putting the DVD in and finding there’s no Captions. It’s like a balloon deflating rapidly, and the ice-cream turns sour.
New Zealand movies are the biggest culprits of no captioning. There’s nothing worse than reading a really good write up/rave about a New Zealand movie, waiting for the DVD to come out, to find that it’s not captioned.
How can we get across to the people bringing in these DVD’s the importance of providing them to us with English Subtitles or Captions? Seems to me that the Americans caption a DVD, then when they are copied for other regions, the captions are deliberately left off for some reason. Who do we lobby for this?
Captioning with TV OnDemand
Whilst TVNZ do a wonderful job with captioning, if you miss a program and want to view it on the internet to catch up, there is currently no captioning service on this. It would be wonderful if this could be done. Captioning is being done on some You Tube dialogues using software that captures the word as it the character(s) speaks. It’s not perfect, but you can easily get the gist. I wonder if TVNZ could use this software to provide captions for those that like to use this service? I know I would use it if I could, especially with a). no longer being able to record captions on my DVD recorder, and b). no longer able to record the channel I’m not watching because Freeview doesn’t allow this.
Law
One of the things that New Zealand doesn’t have is a law like the ADA (American with Disabilities Act), which makes it illegal not to provide access for any disability, and in our case, captions or subtitling. I’m wondering whether we should lobby for this change?
Maori TV/Prime/TV3 News
It would be great if these could be captioned. Someone said to me yesterday that if we can provide whole TV channels for new immigrants coming into our country (Asian TV), why can’t they provide captioning for the Kiwi’s that live here that need this service, on as many channels as possible, including Pay TV.
Dialogue/Suggestions.
I would like to invite dialogue to this subject. I don’t want complaints, I want ideas. What can we do to change and improve our access to captioning? What are your ideas? Do you have any suggestions?
Please comment on the blog in the reply field. All will be considered and I’ll keep updating the blog as news comes to hand.
Captioning or Subtitles in New Zealand 