11 October 2011
An average viewer in the UK watched 4 hours, 3 minutes a day of linear TV in the first six months of 2011, according to a report from TV marketing body Thinkbox, using figures from the Broadcasters' Audience Research Board (BARB).
The same report states that people in the UK are watching more commercial television than ever before due to the popularity of catch up services such as Sky+ and BBC iPlayer.
However,despite this astounding development, barring a few programmes on the BBC iplayer, no other online player, catch-up or on-demand, is set up to deliver audio description (AD).
In order to find out if there was any interest amongst blind and partially sighted in watching programmes with AD via these online players, we requested people to get in touch with us to tell us what they thought about the inability of almost all online players to deliver AD.
Here are a few comments that we felt were particularly interesting and wanted to share them with our readers:
"I use AD (audio description) quite a lot and find not all programs have it but it is getting more common and hope that it continues to increase. I would love to have it enabled on the internet also as I use my laptop constantly to overcome my very limited vision."
(Female audio description)
"I frequently use audio description using Sky but if I miss a show, it's often the case that I have to watch it without the audio description. I use BBC iPlayer, ITV player and five on demand along with 4OD on occasion and all are sadly not distributing audio descriptions in their later broadcasts."
(Female audio description user)
"Catch up TV needs to have audio description but I believe that we [also] need to go beyond catch up and look at on demand movies and rentals too. 'Catch up' doesn't go far enough, 'on demand' is the fuller picture. As far as I'm aware, neither iTunes nor Lovefilm have audio description versions available. This is distressing as we know that many DVDs have AD on them."
(Male audio description user)
"Simply put, I don't even bother to look at any online TV catch-up services as I know (unless there has been a drastic improvement) that there are no facilities to use AD on them. I am a subscriber to LoveFilm, but will never download a film that has no AD, no point!
(Male audio description user)
RNIB is currently working to secure quotas for all television programmes to provide access services, regardless of the platform through which they are delivered. This must include programmes available through IPTV (for example BT Vision) and on the internet (for example ITV Player, lovefilm or Sky Go).