One of the many great aspects of TV accessibility over the past two decades has been working in an industry where there is continually increasing demand. When I started as a subtitler in 1993, we were supplying subtitles for roughly 20% of two channels, maybe 3,000-4,000 hours a year of mostly long turnaround pre-recorded programmes. Today, I’ve lost count of the number of channels and hours we cover from our operations across seven countries. And, with the continuing proliferation of channels, web streaming and over-the-top services, there is ever more content out there to be made accessible.

Over the same period, the nascent accessibility industry has rapidly become highly competitive as many new companies have formed, broadcasters’ internal departments have been outsourced, academic disciplines have sprung up and the supporting technology industry has developed, including now those key disruptors – the cloud, the crowd and automation. Much greater demand for volume also brings much greater pressure on broadcasters’ budgets through an already challenging time for them as licence fees come under scrutiny and competition for subscriptions or advertising spend increases. It’s been a rollercoaster ride at times on price and competition and this shows no signs of abating. Businesses have to fight tooth and nail to hang onto what they’ve got before even thinking about growth.

As for quality, in the early 1990s, subtitles on TV were still an exception. In 2016, they are an expectation in many countries and the expectation is not only that they are reliably available but that they are of a high quality. The audience knows what is good and what is not and they understand the reasons why. Accuracy remains a key factor but latency in live subtitling is probably even more important in people’s perception of quality (see here). Regulators and lobby groups are ever more sophisticated and demanding in how they tackle quality issues and, with the blessed advent of the screenshot and the tweet, the pressure’s always on.

So how does a business balance these sometimes conflicting pressures of growth in demand, price competition and quality in 2016? First thing to do is to accept you can’t escape them. It’s in all our interests, including the audience’s, for accessibility services to get faster, cheaper and better; cheaper because our goal should be for all content to be made accessible, for no-one to be excluded, and the only way to achieve that is to make the cost of services appropriate to every piece of content.

In 2016, five key questions face us as an industry:

  • How do you successfully integrate automation (specifically automatic speech recognition) into production processes without compromising on quality?
  • How do you effectively harness the power of the crowd in the face of the volume challenge?
  • How do you make sure that a piece of content is only ever subtitled once and that subtitles are automatically available for long-form or short-form re-use wherever it is shown?
  • How can broadcasters and content owners derive enough value from their access services to make regulatory compulsion unnecessary?
  • How do we get to 100% accurate, zero latency live subtitles?

These are the kinds of questions that many industries of much greater maturity than accessibility will be grappling with but we’re meeting them head on. In fact, not only that, I’d say substantial progress is being made on all fronts. There’s much to be proud of in the endeavours of this young discipline. We’ve had to grow up quickly.

David Padmore, Head of Access Services