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UN recommends Australia legislate on audio descriptions

It has taken over 7 years of campaigning but the UN wants change in Australia for the blind & vision impaired community.

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A seven+ year campaign to have Australian networks provide audio descriptions for the blind and vision impaired community has resulted in a United Nations committee finding Australia in breach of an international human rights treaty.

The UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities has recommended that Australia take “the necessary legislative and policy measures … to ensure the provision of audio description services”.

In 2015 Vision Australia lodged complaints with the Australian Human Rights Commission against Seven, Nine, 10, SBS and Foxtel over a lack of audio descriptors.

They argued the failure to provide adequate audio description amounts to discrimination and a breach of Australia’s obligations under the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.

It has been a long road for campaigners. Following trials in 2012 and 2016, ABC provided audi0 description programmes with approximately 14 hours of programming while SBS offered audio description on select programs (but not on iview nor SBS on Demand).

But there are still no laws requiring any free-to-air and commercial broadcasters to create audio described content.

Australia is the only country in the OECD to not provide audio descriptions.

Melbourne disability advocate Lauren Henley tells ABC, “The very first thing I watched with the first trial of audio description that happened in Australia was a David Attenborough documentary.

“And it was an amazing experience. Having visual memory, I could picture everything as they were describing everything, and that is so powerful.

“Yes, this is a human rights issue. Yes, you are required to provide audio description for people who are blind or visually impaired.”

Federal communications minister Michelle Rowland said the government is considering the decision and will “provide a response in due course”.

5 Responses

  1. As a deaf person and uses Auslan as my primary mode of communication, I’m not surprised by this. Australia is such a backward country when it comes down to people with disabilities. I’ve been to the UK and was amazed with how accessible it was for them.

  2. The ABC has had this for some time, I’ve watched the occasional program on SBS with it, but no other free to air, pay tv or streaming have it. The next vital step I believe is this service should be made compulsory for TV manufacturers to incorporate as a standard feature into all models of televisions they make which would help those who can’t afford the latest and greatest all bells and whistles models. When upgrading my TV earlier this year I struck this problem trying to find a suitable model with this feature and the sad part was the sales assistant knew very little of this very feature or even how it works which then propelled me on to explain it to the said sales assistant which was a frustrating situation for a customer to be in. Even simpler would be incorporate it into voice control and do away with accessing settings altogether.

  3. Australia does have Audio Description, the ABC is broadcasting about 8 hours a day. . And it does have captioning requirements administered by the ACMA for commercial TV. It just doesn’t have legislation mandating it. There was a proposed amendment to the Broadcasting Services Act in 2019, not sure what happened with it, probably got lost in COVID like everything else a minority Government with a hostile senate.

  4. All I can say is about time! I really think if it wasn’t for such laws in the USA the hearing and vision impaired wouldn’t have such variety in accessible content on SVOD services such as Netflix and Amazon here in Oz (although the hearing impaired do have to put up with the “Mom” and “realize” typos). But because there’s no laws (for audio description) or inconsistent laws (for closed captioning) here the “Australian stories” (as the Oz production companies are talking so much about at the moment with SVOD quotas) don’t have the same level of accessibility.

  5. The new British Sign Language legislation has ensured that sign language interpreters on-screen are required for a certain amount of programming. I think this is just as much of a priority as audio descriptions, which are also very useful and helpful for blind or sight impaired persons.

    Both sign language and audio descriptions should be legislated.

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