Australian Federation of Disability Organisations

Raising children – apparently not for deaf Australians?

21 August 2007

The Deafness Forum of Australia, the peak body for Australian consumers who are Deaf, have a hearing impairment or suffer from a chronic disorder of the ear, has questioned the accessibility of a new DVD aimed at parents. The Raising Children network was given $2.7m of federal funds to make the parenting DVD available free of charge to all Australians.

Raising Children was launched by Prime Minister John Howard yesterday, but calls and emails to the Prime Minister’s office, and the Raising Children organisation on Monday failed to confirm or deny whether the DVD contains captions or audio description.

A spokesperson from the Department of Families, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs – which provided some of the funding for the DVD – confirmed to Deafness Forum late Monday evening that the DVD did not include captions or audio description. In the conversation with Deafness Forum CEO Nicole Lawder, the Department have informally offered to ensure that future copies of the DVD include captions.

Captions would enable the one in six Australians who currently have some form of hearing impairment to follow DVDs, while audio description would enable people who are blind or vision impaired to access the DVD. Around 20 per cent of the population would benefit from captions and/or audio description on this DVD.

“I was very hopeful that the DVD would provide access features for Australians who are hearing or vision impaired” said Nicole Lawder, Deafness Forum CEO. “This would be a great companion to the Raising Children website, which has some great information on it for parents in an easy to use format. But unfortunately, the DVD does not include features which would provide access for parents who are deaf or hearing impaired.”

“To add insult to injury”, added Ms Lawder “this week is Hearing Awareness Week, and also the week in which we hold the annual Captioning Awards. This is one DVD and organisation that certainly will not win an award.”

“I presumed that since federal funding – taxpayers money – was used to fund the DVD, that access was considered. This would be in line with a recent decision by the Film Finance Corporation (FFC) to require captions on all FFC-financed feature films from 1 July 2007. Also, federal government policy is to caption TV commercials for government information. “While it is not for me to judge whether this constitutes discrimination, we will certainly be following up to determine what we can do to ensure that government funding is used in a way that allows access for all Australians” Ms Lawder said.

In 2005 there were more than three and a half million people who were Deaf or hearing-impaired living in Australia. This is expected to increase to four million by 2010 and nearly five million by 2020. By 2050, one in four Australians will have a hearing loss.

For further information, contact
Nicole Lawder
CEO Deafness Forum of Australia
Voice telephone: 02 6262 7808 (BH), 0404 037 177(MOB) Text (TTY) telephone: 02 6262 7809 (BH).