TORONTO – Canada’s largest accessibility organizations are calling on the CRTC to divert a portion of vertical integration transactions – like Bell and CTV – to a fund that would help broadcasters make their content 100% accessible.
The Access 2020 Coalition has proposed that 1% of all TV ownership transactions from 2010 until 2015 be allocated to accessibility research, including standards development and systematic, third-party monitoring of progress towards full accessibility in terms of captioning and described video.
“The tools to make TV accessible were invented more than thirty years ago,” said Beverley Milligan, on behalf of Media Access Canada which is spearheading the Coalition. “Yet only 3% of the programs aired by TV stations are described for blind, partially sighted or low-vision people, captioning errors in captioning make many programs impossible to watch, and the TV content that is so widely available on-line or through mobile telephones is not accessible at all.”
The Coalition also includes the Canadian Hard of Hearing Association, the March of Dimes and Easter Seals of Canada.
