Audio Description and Captioning: Luxury or Necessity?

OZeWAI Australian Accessibility Conference Panel

Screenwest hosted a panel discussion entitled Audio Description and Captioning: Luxury or Necessity? in addition to an interactive workshop on audio description at the Australian Accessibility Conference in Perth.

Professor Katie Ellis and emerging writer/director, Tony Sarre and disability and diversity consultant Zel Iscel spoke with Feisty Dame Producer, Tania Chambers about the barriers to full audience access to broadcast and other digital content.

About the Panelists

Tania Chambers

Managing Director of Feisty Dame Productions, Tania Chambers produced the comedy feature A Few Less Men and the comedic thriller Kill Me Three Times.

Tania produced the short film Tango Underpants and executive produced the factual series End of Empireand Turning Point, as well as short films One Fine Day, High Tide, Dark Whispers and A Shared Affair.

Tania is a member of Screenwest’s Diversity Leadership Group, the Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts (AACTA) and of WIFT Australia (Women in Film and Television), an Honorary Life Member of Women in Film and Television (NSW).

Tony Sarre

Tony Sarre is a Western Australian filmmaker who is legally blind. Tony’s aim is to tell screen stories from a disabled point of view, with a focus on living with blindness. He says that screen practitioners who are disability diverse should have agency, power and control over their lives and how they tell their stories.

In 2018, Tony made Working Dog which is the first in this series of short films and looks at the relationship between a blind person and their Seeing Eye Dog.

Tony is a member of Screenwest’s Diversity Leadership Group.

Katie Ellis

Katie Ellis is Senior Research Fellow and Convenor of the Critical Disability Studies Research Network in the Internet Studies Department at Curtin University, Australia.

She has published widely in the area of disability, and digital and networked media, extending across both issues of representation and active possibilities for social inclusion.

Zel Iscel

Zel Iscel is a disability and diversity consultant with lived experience!

Zel was born blind and arrived with her family to Australia at the age of six. In 2014 she established her own disability consultancy Inclusive World.

She is currently a Project Officer at Women’s Health and Family Services where she develops guidelines and develops services to support women with disabilities through the organisation.

About OZeWAI

OZeWAI is the Australian Web Accessibility Initiative, which is a strong and established group of members. OZeWAI is proud to provide a valuable source of information on accessibility issues and ideas to the broader community.

OZeWAI is an association of volunteers working to make the information world more inclusive. It was the first such organisation in Australia and has been a leading initiative in the field for more than 20 years. Many international and high-profile experts have contributed to OZeWAI activities. OZeWAI has introduced many developers and managers to the need for accessibility, the means by which it can be promoted, and a supportive network of concerned practitioners.

PWAC is the Perth Web Accessibility Camp, which has been running since 2013 to educate and inform the West Australian web community about all aspects of digital accessibility. It is run by members of the Perth Web Accessibility Meetup group.

The second half of the session offered participants the opportunity to listen to a professionally audio described short film and to create their own ‘off the cuff’ and at times, hilarious, descriptions of locally produced short film, Tango Underpants.