Is the telly for everyone?

Visualising subtitle and audio description availability on European TV channels

Image by author.

Equitable access to goods and services, no matter how trivial, has been a core tenet of the disability justice movement since its inception. Aside from commonly discussed urban design questions such as the addition of ramps to buildings, giving the largest section of the population sensory access to entertainment (i.e. films, concerts, and multimedia broadcasts) is bound to reduce social isolation, educate a wider public, and broaden perspectives. After all, don’t you sometimes relish sharing your hot take on the trending series of the day?

So in the wake of Euro 2020 (which I haven’t yet bothered watching), I wondered whether everyone with physical access to a TV set could enjoy the content it offered.

UK regulatory agency Ofcom has released quarterly data on three types of adaptations that strive to give people with sensory disabilities a fuller experience of TV: audio description, subtitles, and sign language interpretation. The first involves a narrator describing videos or scenes (i.e. “the surgeons snog as their pagers beep furiously”) for those with low vision. Most of us are familiar with the second and third; both can be useful because not all D/deaf people are comfortable with subtitles, and not everyone knows sign.

A simple visualisation

I focused on only audio description and subtitles because of data completeness, gathering a final sample of 85 channels from Denmark, France, Sweden, and the UK who were subject to regular monitoring of their accessibility services by Ofcom in the first and second quarters of the 2019 fiscal year.

First, here’s a general picture of the extent to which each channel offers both services (or the amount of each channel’s content that is accessible through each respective service):

Each dot represents one channel. Data from Ofcom.

Here, clusters of dots are visible at opposite ends of the percentage scale. There are two main reasons for this:

1. “Quotas”, or targets set by Ofcom each year, tend to be much lower for audio description than for subtitling (see this guidance).
2. Though the cost of audio description varies (this depends on the amount of spoken content needed), it is generally much higher than subtitling services. Therefore, even companies who must comply with legal guidance on accessibility may find it difficult to do so.

The minimum proportion of audio-described content offered was 7%, while the maximum was 76%. For subtitled content, these figures were 35% and 100% respectively (some broadcasters had quotas of complete subtitling for the year monitored).

A tabular presentation

After experimenting with a variety of visualisation formats, I found interactive tables the most straightforward way to share accessibility data on individual channels within broadcasters and countries. By using the “search” function, you can see how much of your favourite channels’ content can be accessed by people with sensory impairments. You can also rank channels by alphabetical order or by their proportion of accessible content.

Subtitles:

Audio description:

What do you think of this data? Were you pleasantly surprised by the amount of subtitling and audio description already present, or frustrated that more was not available?

I identify with both views. I think we need to raise more awareness of the services that exist while raising the accessibility standard for broadcasters across regions. And we can’t forget that accessible content doesn’t only enhance the lives of disabled people; subtitles make my viewing experience better when the hammering of neighbourhood construction work feels endless, and audio description has potential for use in sonic filmmaking forms that don’t require a single visual element.

Thank you so much for reading! Your feedback and suggestions are appreciated.

Appendix: Notes and methodology

• I enjoyed using two free data visualisation software unfamiliar to me for this piece: RAWGraphs 2.0 and Datawrapper. The former is intuitive and has attractive in-built aesthetics, though it can only produce static visualisations suitable for print. The latter is more flexible (I especially loved that I could enclose country flags within my table using a clever text addition), though perhaps less customisable than tools such as Flourish. I would recommend trying both!

The UX Collective donates US$1 for each article we publish. This story contributed to World-Class Designer School: a college-level, tuition-free design school focused on preparing young and talented African designers for the local and international digital product market. Build the design community you believe in.