Hi there. Thanks for having me.
My name is Joe Clark. I live here in Toronto. This is the third time I've given evidence before this esteemed committee. I was here in 2002 and also in 1990. I hope this will be the time when something actually happens after my appearance.
I have a 25-year interest in accessibility for people with disabilities. I do consulting work for clients on accessibility. It's mostly web accessibility, and topics like captioning and audio description. I've done a couple of little jobs for CBC here and there, but I don't have any contracts with them at present. I give lectures and presentations around the world on accessibility and other topics, and I wrote a book on web accessibility.
So let's start with some terminology. I think everyone in this room knows what captioning is. It is a transcription of dialogue and important sound effects for deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers. For live shows and a few other programs, we use real-time captioning, which usually involves a stenographer typing on a specialized keyboard, although now some people are trying to use a certain type of voice recognition. There are two main presentation styles for captioning. If you've watched a live show with captioning, you've seen scroll-up captioning, in which words appear from left to right and then are pushed up another line and a new line comes along. The other option is pop-on captioning, in which a single caption appears as a stationary block and is replaced by another stationary block or a blank screen.
Today I don't have time to talk about two really important topics, which are audio description for the blind and accessibility on the web, including accessibility of video on the web. You can ask me about those later, if you wish. Today I'm only going to talk about captioning.
What's going on with captioning at the CBC? Well, did you know CBC is the only broadcaster in the world that has to caption every second of its broadcast day? That's because a deaf lawyer, Henry Vlug, filed a human rights complaint about missing and inadequate captioning, and he won. Starting in November 2002, CBC claimed to comply with that decision by captioning everything on CBC television and Newsworld. But they aren't captioning everything. For three years, I watched CBC and took notes. I found well over 100 cases of missing or inadequate captioning. I published my results in November 2005, and it seemed that I was being taken seriously.
The Canadian Human Rights Commission forwarded my findings to CBC, which eventually bothered to respond. The CBC agreed that all of the different kinds of captioning errors I found had happened or could have happened, and they claimed to be tightening up their procedures. But the CBC sounded defensive and angry on other points. CBC claimed that subtitled movies don't need to be captioned, even though sound effects are never subtitled; that scroll-up captioning was just fine for dramas and comedies; and that real-time captioning absolutely should be used for programs that aren't live. They angrily defended themselves, using terms like “disagree strenuously” and “dispute vehemently”.
Then the Human Rights Commission tried to scuttle the case. My lawyer made the mistake of using the word “complaint” in a letter to the Canadian Human Rights Commission, and they seized on that and made it sound like there was never a complaint in the first place, and I'd have to file one from scratch. Basically, the Human Rights Commission tried to cancel its own investigation. CBC captioning hasn't really improved. Nothing has been completely fixed. I'm still taking notes, and the results are up on my website.
Now, if CBC can't maintain 100% accessibility, who can? If a public broadcaster cannot maintain a legal requirement to provide 100% captioning, what hope do we have for 100% captioning anywhere? Why would private broadcasters, who'll do anything to save a penny, put in any effort at all to get to 100% captioning? What hope do we have for audio description for the blind on most programming or all programming?
On several occasions, I've offered to meet with CBC to talk about captioning and accessibility in general. But they've always refused, and they did that even after they promised to meet me away back in 2002. I think it's all very embarrassing that I proved that CBC isn't living up to its requirements and that the Canadian Human Rights Commission has been asleep at the switch and hasn't been enforcing its own ruling.
Okay, what about French captioning? Well, back in 2004, retired Senator Jean-Robert Gauthier, who some of you may know personally, and who was a hard-of-hearing person, filed a complaint against Société Radio-Canada concerning captioning. As part of the settlement process, CBC agreed to submit a report on the state of captioning, particularly real-time captioning, on Radio-Canada and Réseau de l’information. I read the report, and I wrote the only known critique of it. All they were proposing was to increase the pool of real-time captioners by two people, and they weren't going to guarantee 100% captioning. There wasn't any discussion of quality standards.
And what about quality of captioning? Well, CBC has a lot of problems there. First of all, they still insist on using all capital letters, a ridiculous holdover from the 1970s. They have a homegrown captioning standard that isn't the same as the standard used at Radio Canada. Having two standards means you don't have a standard.
And neither of those standards was published, let alone tested. They use real-time captioning for shows that aren't live. They don't prepare their real-time captioners well enough. If you watch sports programming that doesn't involve professional sports, you'll find that most of the proper names are mangled, because they weren't provided to the captioners in advance. A lot of these shows are actually pre-recorded and shouldn't be using real-time captioning in the first place. CBC is totally in love with scroll-up captioning because it's so cheap, and they use it on completely inappropriate shows like fictional narrative programming. It's impossible to follow a drama or a comedy using scroll-up captioning. Try it sometime.
They refuse to caption subtitle programming or outside commercials. Only commercials for the CBC itself, things like promos for upcoming shows, are supposed to be captioned, and even then sometimes they aren't. They refuse to use Canadian English. You'd think this kind of colonialism would be extinct by now, but CBC uses British English, and they don't even get that right.
Now funnily enough, I have a solution to this problem. I'm the founder of the open and closed project. It's an independent non-profit research project that I've been incubating for five years. Our goal will be to write a set of standards for the four fields of audio-visual accessibility: captioning and audio description, subtitling, and dubbing. There are no such standards, at least none that were developed in an open process and were tested with viewers. We're going to spend four years developing the standards, and then a year testing them in the real world. We'll publish the specifications and train and certify practitioners. At that point, it will be possible for broadcasters like the CBC and producers and the CRTC and viewers to insist that all their accessibility be open and closed certified.
Also at that point, there won't be as many kinds of captioning as there are companies doing it. Everything will be standardized. There will just be captioning. There won't be CBC-style captioning or CTV-style, or the style of whoever had the lowest bid. We need half a million bucks for the first year, and $5 to $7 million for the whole seven-year project—which is peanuts. We've applied for funding from the social benefits spending from several of the broadcast industry mergers. We have bubkes so far, but that can't last, because we have support from all over the place.
We have industry support. We have signed support letters from captioning and description providers, software makers, and broadcasters in four countries.
We have grassroots support. I set up a micro-patronage program to pay for fundraising for the full project. Two hundred and fifteen people made voluntary financial contributions, and dozens of them wrote support letters.
We're friends with all the right researchers. Not only are we on a first-name basis with all the right researchers in the accessibility field, but we've got verbal agreements with some of them.
But the open and closed project does not have CBC's support. Now, some staff are privately supportive, including one person who wrote us a support letter. But we need more than that. It would mean a lot, really, if Canada's national public broadcaster accepted the need for outside independent standards and supported their development. Support could mean anything. It doesn't have to cost money. A good place to start would be a public statement. But for that to happen, CBC would have to get over itself and stop being so arrogant and defensive. By the way, not only has the CBC failed to support the open and closed project, it has held secret closed-door meetings with other broadcasters and other audio description service providers to rewrite existing standards.
To sum up, CBC has an unusual captioning requirement, and they aren't living up to it. They're angry and defensive when you ask them about it. The Human Rights Commission refused to enforce or even investigate its own ruling. CBC cooks up its own standards rather than supporting independent open standards.
Thank you.