CALGARY – Shaw’s application to buy Canwest excludes Canadians with disabilities, according to Media Access Canada (MAC).
MAC, the Alliance for Equality of Blind Canadians, the Canadian Hard of Hearing Association and the Canadian National Institute for the Blind appeared before the CRTC on Wednesday asking that a portion of the deal’s tangible benefits be used to fund research, technical innovation, business modelling and education initiatives to improve captioning quality and increase levels of described content.
“Given Shaw’s technical expertise and financial strength, we had hoped to see leadership to increase and improve accessible programming for the one in four Canadians whose hearing or vision is impaired,” said Beverley Milligan, MAC’s acting president and CEO, in a statement. “But none of the $203 million offered by Shaw as tangible benefits has been directed at the long-term, enduring benefit of making television programming accessible to all Canadians.”
Milligan said that to be fully accessible by the 25% of Canadians who have hearing and/or visual impairments, TV programs must be captioned and described (captioning translates a program’s spoken elements into text, while audio description reads text such as sports scores aloud, and video description provides narrative descriptions of programs’ key visual elements).
“Making all TV programming fully accessible by millions of Canadians would not only be an enduring legacy of this transaction, but would demonstrate real leadership and commitment on the part of Shaw”, Milligan continued. “It took the CRTC 25 years to require that all TV content be captioned. Should we have to wait another 25 years for all programming to be described?”
