Subtitles Needed for Sky OnDemand
A 16-year-old North Tyneside boy claims deaf people aren’t being treated fairly by Sky TV.
Jamie Danjoux from Wideopen wants subtitles to be available for all shows on their catch up service called OnDemand.
He has severe hearing loss in both ears, he often misses out on some of his favourite shows because he can’t watch them live or record them.
Jamie set up a petition more than a year ago which has reached 4,500 signatures so far but he feels like it has been ignored.
“We should have the same access as everyone who doesn’t use subtitles, but we’ve still got a limited service and can only watch a few programs and that makes it quite unfair. We still pay the same price as everyone else so why should we have to miss out.”
“Hopefully it’ll start be much better for everyone soon and it’s worth paying that money.”
Sky tell us they are taking action though. Between January and March of this year they provided subtitles on more than 4,000 hours of on demand content. That’s compared to just 1,600 hours of on demand content in the whole of last year.
A Sky spokesperson said:
“We absolutely understand why Jamie and others with hearing difficulties feel so strongly about this. As part of our commitment to making our products and services more accessible to all customers, and as more people are watching TV on demand, we are working to increase the amount of subtitled content we offer. We already provide subtitles on more than 80% of content on our live TV channels and this year we have we provided subtitles on more than 4,000 hours of the most popular on demand content.”
Action on Hearing Loss have since been in touch to give their view.
Dr Roger Wicks, Action on Hearing Loss Director of Policy & Campaigns said:
"We welcome Sky’s engagement with Jamie’s petition and it’s important that their good intentions are translated into the actual experience of viewers. The latest report from the regulator ATVOD found that 96.5% of Sky VOD content has no subtitles."
"Sky doesn’t currently offer subtitles on any downloaded on demand content via broadband. Whilst it’s great to see such a positive increase to the level of subtitles on programmes that are not downloaded, but are obtained directly from the satellite service, ATVOD’s report confirms that this type of content constitutes just 5% of Sky’s on demand services. This means that 95% of all on demand content remains inaccessible to people with hearing loss."
"We look forward to seeing further, more substantial improvements in provision from Sky, to enable those with hearing loss to enjoy full access to Sky’s services like their hearing peers."
Jamie's petition can be viewed here: