Legislation and Producers Pressures for change Most work on improving access for VI viewers has concentrated on TV broadcasting. This is understandable, given the number of blind and partially sighted people who watch TV and the importance of the medium to our society. The main efforts have been to encourage the provision of subtitling, both closed text and audio. Problems centre on broadcast-led development, and weak legislation and standards.
Entertainment is important, and TV is a dominant form.
One down side of a preoccupation with television's transient programmes and linear format is that less attention has been paid to recorded variants. For example, although Teletext works well for overlaid subtitles in the UK, very few video recorders are effective in recording the bitstream with the programme, so the subtitles are lost on the recording. ADA ensured that the US broadcasters standardised on a system called Secondary Audio Channel, and demanded that set-top boxes be provided which would extract this from the broadcast stream. ADA also required that a substantial proportion of public service broadcasts provided the service. In the UK and Europe, several years after ADA, we have no equivalent legislation.