Major advertisers have been blasted for failing to spend a few hundred dollars captioning TV commercials they spend tens of thousands of dollars to produce.
A B&T investigation has discovered household names including Woolworths, Coles, Westfield, Ford and Hungry Jack’s are excluding up to 20% of Australians by failing to use closed captions.
Figures show one in six people in Australia has a hearing problem and around 400,000 have a hearing aid.
Studies have shown around a third of adverts on Australian TV are captioned, while new legislation means all TV shows will have to be captioned.
According to Catherine Clark, the Deaf Australia spokesperson for captioning, many deaf people feel they are being snubbed and attribute it to “ignorance and cost”.
She told B&T: “I think deaf and hard of hearing people are like any other Australian, they want to have access to the same information that the general community does.
“They may become more aware of brands that are captioned and understand the messages that are given which help inform their decision making.
“So by making more ads accessible to these communities, there is as much potential that these people will buy these brands as it is for those who already do and have access to their ads.
“Also, like everyone else they may get sick of the ads and switch off - which is again a right and an opportunity.”
She added many companies operate disability action plans, but do not extend these to making their products accessible to everyone.
The cost of captioning from one provider, The Sub Station, is currently $200 for 15 second spots, $250 for 30 seconds and $300 for 45-60 second ads.
Chris Mikul, project manager at Media Access Australia, formerly the Australian Caption Centre which used to produce captions for most programmes, said a mixture of logistics, lack of awareness and in some cases, protecting the creative, were reasons for not captioning adverts.
“There are probably more logistics to it given TVCs tend to be made at the very last minute and then distributed, so captioning does interfere with that process I suppose, although there are ways around that,” he said.
“It’s up to the client to say they want it done I suppose. I think a lot of it is just agencies not thinking about captioning, it’s not on a lot of people’s radar.
“They don’t think of it as 20% of Australians have a hearing impairment and this could be a value added thing. I know deaf viewers do appreciate these adverts being captioned.”
By law all Government adverts must be closed captioned, but the Media Access Review Report in December 2010 stopped short of ordering ordinary advertisers to do the same.
Clark said a lack of captioning can also leave deaf people feeling left out when lines from successful campaigns make it into common vocabulary.
“We know that there are some popular throw away lines general community tends to throw in from different advertisements, such as Not happy Jan, and the more deaf and hard of hearing people are exposed to ads, the more they are able to participate in general community dialogue,” she added.
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