COMMENT FROM THE CHAIR

At time of writing, the election is raging with debates and promises. It is interesting to see we have better access to information of what the parties offer to us, better viewing of the leaders' responses to tough questions by presenters and the audience and better sighting of key politicians' body language when they sprout out words of vague promises.

There has been much more live subtitling, thanks to your demands not to be left out, of programmes like Big Brother, sports events and political events. We are more up to date with current issues than ever before, alongside the internet and improving telecommunications. Deaf viewers have real choices to listen attentively, intermittently or 'switch off'; that is what access has given us - to be well informed sufficiently to make decisions about listening to/viewing the TV like our hearing peers, not to be enslaved to it like the old days!

Meanwhile, more and more deaf people are learning media courses, more are making inroads into TV. There is still demand for deaf presenters and deaf-led programmes for the wider deaf community.

How do you feel about the increasing access? Has it made you feel more on par with hearing people? Or is there still room for improvement - what, then? Keep on sending feedback to the DBC - it works.

BBC REGIONAL COUNCILS

DBC member Anne Darby reports:

"The BBC Regional Advisory Councils provide a forum for local people to engage with local programme makers and to raise issues regarding both local radio and television programmes and to comment on national issues and programming. Increasingly comments are being sought about the BBC's Online Services as they come on stream and there is an opportunity to influence future developments in television.

"I applied to join the BBC East Midlands Regional Council in 1999 and have attended meetings on a quarterly basis. I have also attended special consultation events about the new Nottingham On-Line Service and have engaged in discussions advocating for the local Deaf Community in terms of BSL on local television, mainly around the local FDP March for BSL Recognition, and on trying to get deaf people's needs covered in regional news reporting. The issue of subtitling has, however, been my main focus as the subtitling of the early evening local news programme is so inconsistent and consequently frustrating that deaf people tend not to watch the programme. An occasional local programme The Midlands in Parliament is not subtitled. New software introduced last year raised expectations but did not deliver much benefit. Now the Ten O'Clock News has a significant section of local news, the switch from the excellent subtitles to a patchy provision is all the more stark. I have noticed that when the News returns for the closing headlines there are no subtitles. Hmmm.

"An on-line discussion group has commenced for English Regions and I was delighted to find another Regional Advisory Council member, in the North West, also relies on the subtitled provision.

"Subtitling remains high on each agenda locally and the presence of a BSL interpreter at meetings keeps deaf people's needs in the forefront of people's minds. Recently other members of the local Council have raised issues about the inconsistency of sound levels on programmes.

"My term on the Regional Advisory Council ends at the end of 2002, and I would encourage everyone to consider applying for a 3-year stint. Membership of the Council is unpaid but travel expenses are met and hospitality provided.

"If you live in the East Midlands, feel free to email me on anne.darby@bluecom.net with your comments about local programmes, or any exceptionally good national programmes so that your feedback can be passed on to the BBC.

SECRETARIES ROUND-UP

Subs forms accompanied the last edition of Mailshot and this is our first opportunity of saying "thank you" for your donations which enable us to continue to make your needs and views known to broadcasters and regulators. It would be helpful if existing members will encourage their friends and family to join too.

David Warner, one of our long standing committee members has resigned to have more time for other activities. David has been involved in the DBC for about 15 years during which time he was a very successful representative for Meridian region and also our Graphics representative. Some of you will remember the Mailshot covers he designed, we will miss him at committee meetings and know he will remain in touch with us.

Another major change is that David Myers, who has been Treasurer for nearly 20 years resigned and Roger Hewitt has taken his place as Treasurer. David will remain on the committee and might well be called on for financial advice from time to time!

There are vacancies on the Committee if anyone is interested in volunteering. It's not all hard work, it can be fun and success if its own reward.

Feedback over the past few months has been mixed, probably because with the national subtitling output continuing to increase, the focus seems to be on access to regional broadcasting - for both BBC and ITV. Foot and Mouth, train problems, and extremes of weather have had a varied effect in the regions and viewers have been frustrated by the lack of access to live items of regional News. Most of us know that live subtitling is expensive to provide - especially in the regions and we live in hope that broadcasters will find a way of overcoming this problem. Another concern is that there is no subtitling at all for Breakfast Time regional news and we have asked BBC Subtitling to give it high priority when drawing up new programme strands for subtitling.

There are a lot of frustrated viewers who want to know when signed programmes are being transmitted and can't find the information. We know that it is going to be increasingly difficult to get the TV magazines and newspapers to include all this information - and get it right, but we still need to know when it is being transmitted! Please can all broadcasters try to give this information on their teletext pages - let us know where it can be found and we will put it into the next Mailshot.

A recurring complaint when something goes wrong is where to send feedback on subtitled programmes. The only broadcaster to provide an email address is the BBC (but they should also give a fax number for people who don't have email!). DBC thinks all broadcasters should provide contact details either at the end of each subtitled programme or on a teletext page and hope this request will be taken on board. Some of us have the minicom number for the Duty Office but we still experience difficulty getting an answer because the machines are switched off. The reason is that hearing people think that text telephones are fax machines and Duty Officers are as irritated as we are when the phone rings and fails to connect. Perhaps this could be overcome if the textphone is identified as "minicom", recognising that minicom is on a par with "hoover" which many people continue to use to describe other makes of vacuum cleaner!

Broadcast reported that "the BBC and the Open University have drawn up a new agreement which will see BBC2 almost double the number of its OU programme slots. Over the next three years more OU programmes will appear in peaktime slots on BBC2 instead of the current early morning slots at the weekend." We have asked the BBC to ensure that these broadcasts are subtitled because we know that they will be popular with a number of viewers.

Recently I was in John Lewis' TV department and was delighted to see one TV set was showing subtitled and congratulated them on doing so. They said that it is their policy to show subtitles on one TV set and have been doing so for some months. We need to encourage other retailers to adopt this policy and would appreciate members' help in achieving this aim.

Viewers in Anglia got in touch to report problems with subtitles for all the most popular programmes. Thanks to specific feedback from one viewer, Anglia was able to carry out an in-depth investigation which revealed a possible cause for the problem - we all hope this is the case.
Congratulations to the BBC for having a deaf character in the two-part thriller, Messiah, which was transmitted over the Whitsun Bank Holiday weekend. So why did they blot their copybook by using a hearing actress for the part? There are plenty of good deaf actors around who could have played the part much more realistically.

On a positive note, viewers of West Wing (C4) were delighted to see that Marlee Matlin, who is deaf and uses ASL, played the part of a key White House official.

At time of going to press we had received a heavy postbag with complaints that the cable company NTL had stopped transmitting analogue subtitles on Sky. It has been difficult to find out exactly what went wrong but it appears that Sky removed analogue subtitles on their own channels because they want to encourage subscribers to switch to digital services. NTL was aware that this would happen and carried out an engineering procedure without realising that their analogue customers would no longer be able to access subtitles. DBC has spent hours on the phone and email to DCMS, ITC, Sky and NTL and hope that NTL will issue a formal apology to their subscribers.

SPEECH RECOGNITION FOR SNOOKER SUBTITLES

The BBC reports:

"For the first time speech recognition was used to produce live subtitles for the World Snooker Championship on BDBC1 and BDBC2.

"Speech recognition is new and developing technology which is still being perfected. We thought it would be useful to see whether it would help to overcome the problems of providing live subtitles and hope to use speech recognition to provide access to more of the BBC's live sporting events.
"For speech recognition to work, first the subtitler trains the speech recognition software to recognise his or her voice and then builds an appropriate vocabulary for the programme. For example, in Snooker, the software needs to learn that word 'cue' is the appropriate word to use, not 'queue'. During transmission the subtitler listens to the commentary and speaks a version of what they hear into a microphone. The software then 'translates' the spoken word into subtitles which appear immediately on the screen. We have chosen not to attempt to edit the text of the subtitle before it reaches the screen, so that the subtitles are transmitted as quickly as possible and stay relevant to the action. This is particularly important with sports commentaries.

"Speech recognition software is usually trained to recognise everyday English so whenever it is used for other programmes it will be necessary to re-train the software to provide the correct subtitling."

Editors' Note: The Royal Television Society awarded the BBC a Technical Innovation Award for this Assisted Subtitling project. What a pity nobody bothered to publicise this - surely it is something to be proud of?

[Web editor - Information on BBC web site]

SATELLITE AND CABLE BROADCASTERS GROUP

The following is a précis of Tim Walker's presentation at the Open Forum on 28th April:

The Satellite and Cable Broadcasters' Group represents a wide range of broadcasters - both large and small - that broadcast principally on cable and satellite systems although some of our members are also involved with Digital Terrestrial Television. However, our channels do not benefit from the public subsidies and/or advertising revenues which the BBC, ITV, C4 and C5 enjoy or have access to the terrestrial television spectrum. None of our channels have the protection of "must carry" privileges that guarantee a universal audience for the main terrestrial broadcast.

The other major difference is in the audience share. Even the most popular cable and satellite channels have small audience shares, for example Sky One has a 1.7% share compared to 30% for ITV. And in the digital age - with more and more channels launching all the time - audience shares are falling and placing additional pressures on revenues. Many cable and satellite channels have peak audiences that can be measured in tens of thousands rather than millions. For example, 15m people might watch Coronation Street but Sky Travel might only attract a peak audience of 10,000.

When people talk about the provision of subtitling and sign language, there is often an assumption that because - at present - there is no statutory duty on cable and satellite broadcasters to provide subtitling that they make no such provision. This is not the case. As commercial broadcasters we understand the importance of maximising our audiences and providing a potential service to the whole community.

We recently undertook a survey of our members that revealed that in the year 2000 we broadcast more than 97,000 hours of subtitled programmes. The children's channel, Nickelodeon, now subtitles 66% of their output - more than the BBC. Sky One is 40% subtitled and UK Gold 35%. These figures exclude the Sky Box Office 24 hour, multi-channel, pay-per-view movie service which is now 100% subtitled.

Although we would be the first to acknowledge that there is much more that we can do, we are proud of what has been achieved in a relatively short period of time. It has been a far shorter time than it took the BBC and ITV to reach similar levels.

Editor's Note: The next edition of Mailshot will include a report of Coleena Reid's presentation. Coleena is Controller of Broadcasting at Carlton Television.

VIDEO NEWS

Anthony Kent writes:

In the last edition of Mailshot, it was reported that the Thomson DVH8090 Digital VHS machine will record subtitles. Unfortunately, Thomson recently discovered there is a problem with the VCR's encoder/decoder and as a result it will not record subtitles. I apologise for having conveyed incorrect information which was given to me by Thomson. Thomson are really to be congratulated as it is their policy to include the subtitling feature whenever possible.

Bang and Olufsen has a combined TV/VCR called the Beovision Avant which records subtitles whilst actually watching the programme - ie timer programming or recording another channel is not possible. They also have a VCR called the Beocord V8000 which records subtitles BUT only with a Bang and Olufsen TV set. In both cases the subtitles are recorded in white.

Samsung hopes to produce a subtitle VCR next year which is marvellous news - if it happens. Sharp seems sympathetic but has no plans to do anything at present Manufacturers have been known to change their minds, if other people were to write to all manufacturers it certainly would help to convince them of the need for these machines. The more letters manufacturers receive, the more likely they are to review their policies.

I would be interested to know how others feel about the fact that most DVDs are in the widescreen format, so when you watch them on a square TV screen, they will have black bars at the top and bottom. I personally can't abide it, tapes are available in either conventional (fullscreen 4:3) size or widescreen (16:9) so why aren't DVDs? A few DVDs do have the widescreen on one side and fullscreen on the other, if only all DVDs could be like this that would please everyone. As for the captions, on most DVDs they are positioned in the centre of the screen, making it difficult to know who is speaking. Captions are usually transparent which makes them slightly hard to see on a bright background (Carlton tells me that their DVD captions do have a black backing). On some, the captions are quite small, if DVD is eventually to replace tape, I think some improvements will need to be made. I have made these points to various distributors with little effect, again only when others complain are they likely to listen.

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