Outcome of public forum: captioned movies inquiry
Page updated 2 March 2000
On November 2, 1999 the Acting Disability Discrimination Commissioner announced that she was undertaking an inquiry (see Notice of Inquiry) on the issue of movie captioning for deaf movie patrons.
Interested parties were invited to make submissions. Ten submissions have been received and are available on the HREOC website.
The Commissioner decided to convene a public meeting in Sydney on February 25 2000 to discuss this issue further.
All interested parties, whether or not they made an initial submission, were invited to provide new or additional written comments by February 18, 2000, and/or attend the forum and make oral submissions and participate in the discussion.
The following summary of proceedings has been approved by the Commissioner:
The Captioned Movies Forum was held on February 25, 2000 in Sydney. Representatives from major movie exhibitors, movie distributors, deaf and hard of hearing advocacy groups and service organisations, and the captioning sector attended.
The Forum was held for the purpose of discussing options for making cinema presentations accessible to people who, due to being deaf or hard of hearing, require captioned dialogue in place of the movie sound track.
Forum discussions were positive and all participants expressed a willingness to work together towards improving access for deaf and hard of hearing movie patrons. The movie exhibitors and distributors agreed to develop a proposal on how this might be achieved in consultation with the hearing advocacy groups and others in attendance at the Forum. The proposal will be considered by a further meeting of the Forum to be held in late April 2000. Consideration will also be given to looking more closely at what technology is available to facilitate movie captioning.
All participants at the Forum were interested in discussing ways to increase access and were optimistic a way forward could be found. When further actions are agreed upon they will be publicised on the HREOC website.