Other accessible services
Subtitling and audio description have been mentioned as examples of added facilities that make broadcast television programmes accessible to people with particular types of disability. Signing (in British Sign Language, for example) and lipspeaking are further examples of measures that help people with hearing difficulties to follow programmes. Both have been tried successfully on a limited basis. As with subtitling, they require a portion of the television screen to be dedicated to displaying spoken information in a visual mode. They therefore have to be provided selectively on demand - and received on specially equipped sets - or else mainly confined to specialist programmes broadcast at unsocial hours.
Another likely requirement is for 'clean' audio. This means that the spoken word is broadcast without any sound effects or background music that would mask the speech for hard of hearing listeners. This facility would be applicable to radio as well as television transmission and would be cheap to provide in television, because there the speech component is usually recorded on separate tracks to facilitate foreign language dubbing when the programme is sold in other markets. It does, however, require an additional transmission channel and suitably equipped receivers. As exchange of programmes across Europe becomes more commonplace in the new de-regulated environment, it may become possible for viewers to select which language track they wish to hear, in which case de-selection of the background track should cause no difficulty. Until then, reception of clean audio will require special facilities.
In digital television, facilities such as those described above will call for the use of subsidiary channels, or sub-channels, to carry the information and allow it to be separated from the mainstream signal. Viewer selection of the appropriate subsidiary channels, and the ability to mix the signal into the visual or audio output of the receiver, will hinge upon the capability of the receiving set. In the interim period, while the industry scenario for digital TV reception is still evolving, this amounts to the capability of the set-top box used to receive digital signals and display them through a conventional analogue receiver. As mentioned earlier, there is scope for regulators to influence the technical standards, although these will be implemented at a European rather than a national level. A particular aim must be to achieve compatibility between satellite, cable and terrestrial systems, with the added complication that satellite broadcasting lies within a global, rather than European, environment. The recently exposed commercial weakness of terrestrial digital television will make the regulator's task, which was always going to be difficult, very much harder.
The de-regulation of broadcasting may be uncharted territory, but there is a wealth of experience in telecommunications to draw on, following liberalisation in that sector. The new regulator will have responsibilities for both, and a number of issues which are already under debate will need to be resolved. The major accessibility issues in telecommunications would appear to be linked to the availability and affordability of broadband services, both in fixed line and through third generation mobile networks. Broadband, with its accompanying multi-media capability, can potentially provide many added value services to disabled users. High definition video telephones, now available experimentally and expensively, are adequate for sign communication and lipreading but will not be of significant value for deaf users until there is a large installed base. This in turn depends upon the cost of the equipment and the broadband connection falling to levels acceptable to domestic consumers. When this point is reached there will doubtless be a need for a Videophone relay service to parallel the present TypeTalk, and the scope of universal service will be due for further review. These seem to be issues for the longer term, although encouragement to offer low-cost broadband service is a present high priority.
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