Joe Clark, a freelance disabled-rights activist, talks to the Toronto Star about the growing, positive trend of making TV and films accessible to the deaf and blind, and about the CRTC's (the Canadian equivalent of the FCC, which, among other things, regulates Canadian television/radio to ensure that a minimum proportion of the programming has "Canadian content") role in inadvertently undermining it:
Clark is now battling another thorny problem. Under CRTC rules, Canadian cable companies that simulcast U.S. programs on Canadian channels must carry them not only with closed captions but also with audio descriptions.
"If a U.S. (program) feed has closed captioning or audio description and the Canadian feed doesn't, the cable company cannot substitute the Canadian feed," says Clark. "But they are doing so, unintentionally."
He's complained to the CRTC in writing: "We went through this denial of accessibility with captioning in 1981, and despite years of warning that U.S. programming on commercial networks would begin to be aired with descriptions, Canadian broadcasters … are still blocking the description signals."
(Thanks, Joe!)
