No Space for Disabled and Deaf

Subtitles Now!, a campaign against digital arts channel The Space, has been launched by Disabled/Deaf-led creative business start up Pesky People. Arts Council England (ACE) and the BBC launched The Space online and on Freeview HD in May, with a budget of £4.5m and the aim of transforming “the way people connect with, and experience, arts and culture”. However little of The Space’s content is subtitled or audio described, rendering it inaccessible to an estimated 10 million Deaf and Disabled people in the UK. Mo McRoberts, Technical Lead for The Space/BBC said: “Browser support for closed captioning is pretty minimal; browser support for audio description is non-existent to date. And so we are having to build things to make it work.” The campaign counters that Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery has subtitled all of its videos using free open source software. It is calling for all video content on The Space to be subtitled, and is asking that ACE provides guidelines to artists and commissioned partners on how to submit content that is accessible. Supporters are encouraged to join the campaign’s Facebook Group, follow @peskypeople on Twitter and to use the Twitter hashtag #subtitlesnow.