ACMA investigates Dancing with the Stars over captioning

Media watchdog the Australian Communications & Media Authority has investigated a broadcast of Dancing with the Stars following a complaint about poor captioning, but was unable to arrive at a ruling due to a failure in record keeping.

The complainant clained that the captions for an episode broadcast in April 2021 covered the contestants’ faces and were too small to read.

“Questions about captioning, why has it moved from the bottom to the top of the screen in front of peoples’ faces. Also, captioning is getting smaller, which is hard if you have vision problems as well,” they said.

Under the Broadcasting Services Act captions must be readable, accurate and comprehensible. Licensees must retain audio-visual records for at least 30 days after a program airs or for at least 90 days if a complaint has been made.

Seven acknowledged that between 5:45 and 7:20 on the Off-Air Recording, captions did cover the faces of contestants as they were introduced, resulting in the viewer not being able to directly associate the visual of each contestant with their name. Seven confirmed the ACMA’s note that the captions were positioned at the top of the screen to allow each contestant’s name to appear at the bottom of the screen.

This decision was made by the captioner.

But Seven was not able to give the ACMA an audio-visual record matching the broadcast, leaving the ACMA unable to make a finding. It therefore broadened the investigation into their record-keeping compliance.

A copy of the off-air recording was retained, however, the hard drive it was saved on was corrupted. To avoid this in the future, Seven’s content services team has put in place both a physical and cloud-based saving location for media files under regulatory investigation.

Seven was found to have breached the BSA for failing to keep adequate audio-visual records.