Nightly News 7 Tasmania in breach over poor captions

Nightly News 7 Tasmania broadcast by Southern Cross Television has been given a breach by the Australian Communications and Media Authority for poor captioning for deaf and hearing impaired viewers.

ACMA assessed a bulletin which screened on 9 November 2023, with local content produced by the Licensee and national and international news sourced from their Seven Network affiliate.

A complainant told ACMA, “I have previously complained by email to this provider. On watching the news service tonight, I found that there had been no improvement since I emailed. The captions appearing on screen are completely out of sync with the news presenters spoken word. In most cases commencement of captions can be delayed 20-30 seconds after the commencement of the spoken word. This renders the news article indecipherable. In addition, as this leads to article overrun, the captions are edited to delete sentences or stopped completely.

“As most of the articles and film clips are prerecorded, there appears to be no excuse why this occurs as surely the captions could have been inserted into the clip.

“Whilst I am not totally hearing incapacitated, this practice leaves me angry and frustrated. I feel that the service demeans hearing impaired people in general and substandard service is more than what they should expect. In that regard I feel it is discriminatory and should not be allowed. It also brings into question the right of the broadcaster to hold a licence to broadcast.”

ACMA assessed the broadcast and found the cumulative effect of readability, accuracy and comprehensibility of the captions was not meaningful to deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers. Amongst the problems were a latency of 24 seconds meaning captions did not coincide with the speech by the corresponding speaker. Some captions appeared for less than a second, rendering them effectively useless.

There were also accuracy problems such as the words ‘I feel very emotional about this, I hope this sets a standard and I applaud the jury for being so sensible and for believing a victim’ being captioned as:

‘DERYN – REALLY EMOTIONAL HOPE IT SETS A PRECENT.’

It concluded the captioning service for the program did not meet the requirements and was a Breach of the Broadcasting Services Act.

Southern Cross acknowledged the broadcast did not meet the standard.

“As a live news broadcast, the captioning for the Program was conducted on a manual live basis – a challenging process requiring captioners to make editorial decisions around live spoken content,” it said.

“On review of the Program, SCA acknowledges that its captioning fell short of the requisite standard on the basis that the manual live captioning function was compromised due to unexpected staff changes.”

It added, “We have made significant progress in securing a captioning service. Currently, we are in negotiations with two providers, and we have already trialed the services of one provider on 23 March, demonstrating a high level of accuracy. We aim to commence this service at the earliest opportunity, pending technical requirements.”