Early bird registrations are now open for the DisabilityCare Australia Conference: My Choice, My Control, My Future.

Join speakers such as the Minister for Disability Reform, Jenny Macklin MP, Professor Emeritus Ron McCallum AO and Disability Commissioner Graeme Innes, as well as other high-profile speakers from across the country and the world.
The conference will bring together more than 1,000 Australians to discuss DisabilityCare Australia, the national disability insurance scheme.
The conference will provide a forum for people to share their unique experiences with disability, find out about the DisabilityCare, how it will work and how governments will help people and service providers transition to this new system of support.
The conference will also offer a premiere look at the Practical Design Fund projects, an initiative that delivers practical solutions and innovative ways to assist people with disability, their families and carers, as well as service providers, to get ready for DisabilityCare Australia.
The conference will include a dinner on the Sunday evening where delegates can network, share your experience and hear more about DisabilityCare Australia.

Registration Fees:

Early Bird (closes 7 June 2013) $250
Dinner Ticket $80
Standard $300
Dinner Ticket $80
Pension Card Holders* $30
Dinner $20
*Individuals registering for the conference who have a pensioner concession card are entitled to register at the concession rate.
For further information and to register for the Conference, please visit www.ndis.gov.au.

Deaf Australia are excited to announce that registrations are now open for the M-Enabling Australasia 2013 conference and showcase being held on 14-15 August in Sydney.

This is shaping up to be a fantastic event, with two days of discussion and practical demonstrations focused on how mobile technologies can benefit people with disability and older people.

Mobile technology is a potential game changer for people with disability and many older people; providing access and inclusion through usable, accessible and affordable mobile equipment and services.
This event is the first of its kind to be held in the southern hemisphere, and is an excellent opportunity to be part of discussions involving local and international experts on accessible technologies, mobile service providers, developers, manufacturers, retail and business groups, regulators, policymakers, and organisations representing people with disability and older people.
The keynote speakers will be Axel Leblois, President and Executive Director, Global Initiative for Inclusive Information and Communications Technology (G3ICT) and Karen Peltz Strauss, Deputy Chief, Consumer and Government Affairs, US Federal Communications Commission. Further speakers will be announced in the coming weeks but plan to register before June 14 to receive a discount (ACCAN members will receive an additional discount).
The themes for the conference include:

• How mobile technology enables increased participation and productivity
• Why M-Enabling matters to Australia – the Australian market and local demographics
• Shaping future market technologies by collaborating on M-Enabling opportunities
• International perspectives: with keynote speakers from the US
• App developers and hardware manufacturers – what works for consumers and what’s technically possible
• Service delivery – perspectives from health, tourism, transport, education, financial and emergency services

M-Enabling Australasia 2013 is a joint partnership between ACCAN and Telstra in cooperation with G3ict and EJ Krause & Associates.
Book your place
For a program, prices and to book your place at M-Enabling Australasia 2013 please visit the conference website www.regonline.com.au/m-enabling

The Northern Territory has now signed on to the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS).

Prime Minister Julia Gillard and NT Chief Minister Adam Giles signed an agreement on 15 May 2013 that will see DisabilityCare Australia, the NDIS’s new name, rolled out across the territory by July 2019.

The scheme will eventually cover an estimated 7000 NT residents with significant or profound disabilities.
“The NDIS is the reform of a generation and has the potential to transform the lives of people in the Northern Territory with disability, their families and carers,” Ms Gillard said in a statement.
Under the agreement, the scheme will launch at a single site in July next year.
Other eligible people with disability in the NT will start entering the scheme from July 2016, and by July 2019 all eligible NT residents will be covered by the scheme.
When the scheme is fully up and running the federal government will pay for about 51 per cent at a cost of about $105 million. The NT will provide the remainder of about $99 million.
The NT deal means Liberal West Australian Premier Colin Barnett is the only leader yet to agree to the disability insurance scheme.

Deaf Australia is always a hive of activity, busy with all sorts of tasks; working hard to make life better for Deaf people. Read more here about what we’ve been up to lately.

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National Summit on Early Intervention & Education for Deaf & Hard of Hearing Children, Canberra, 29 & 30 November 2012

FaHCSIA has sent us feedback on the report from the summit and has requested some changes. We are now waiting for our colleagues at Grant Thornton to make changes. We continue to hope to be able to send the final report out soon.

Early Intervention Working Group

I attended a meeting of this group on 23 April. One of the things the group is discussing is the development of early intervention protocols, i.e. what elements a good early intervention program must have. In preparation for this we are looking at similar documents from overseas.
A member of the Working Group is working on mapping early intervention services in Queensland – i.e. documenting what services are available and in what locations. At a previous meeting she provided some information about this to the group. During April I sent her some feedback on the importance of ensuring that the availability or absence of Auslan/bilingual early intervention services is clearly included in the documentation along with speech and auditory therapy services.

Inquiry into the TAFE system

The House of Representatives Standing Committee on Education and Employment announced an inquiry into the TAFE system in March. TAFE plays a very important role in the education of people who are Deaf so it was important that we send in a submission. We sent out a request for feedback from the community and received a lot of very valuable information which we then used in our submission to the inquiry, sent on 18 April. Many thanks to those who sent us their comments, with special thanks to those people who agreed to have their stories included as case studies. At some point the Committee will make our submission available on its website and you will be able to read it by clicking here.

Employment

The Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations (DEEWR) held a ‘Consumer Day’ in Canberra on 30 April, which I attended along with representatives from other peak disability representative organisations.
In preparation for this I sent out a request for feedback from the community about their experiences and views of the new Disability Employment Services (DES) system. Many thanks to those who sent in feedback; it was very helpful.
At the meeting, DEEWR provided us with a lot of information about the new arrangements for DES and it became clear that a great deal of information that DES consumers should be getting is not actually reaching them. DEEWR agreed to provide information in a more simple and easy to understand format and we agreed to help them by making this information available to our members.
As an example of information that consumers generally do not seem to be aware of, DES providers are required to use their DEEWR funds to cover any support costs a client needs in the Employment Pathways (pre-employment) stage as well as the interview and employment stages. This means that if you are a Deaf person and you want to, for example:

1. do a training course relevant to your Employment Pathways plan but the training organisation is small or privately owned and won’t provide interpreters, or
2. do some work experience or volunteering

then the DES provider has enough funds to provide interpreting. It also means that if you go to a generalist (i.e. not Deaf specific) DES provider and you need an interpreter the DES provider does have enough funds to pay for a qualified interpreter for their meetings with you; it is not acceptable for them to say they don’t have the funds or for them to use unqualified interpreters or staff who ‘can sign’ but are not sufficiently fluent in Auslan for your needs.
This information is clearly set out in the Code of Practice and Service Guarantee that all DES providers have signed up to. You can ask your DES provider for a copy.
Several of us raised the issue of there now being fewer specialist DES providers. For Deaf people this means more Deaf people have to go to generalist (not Deaf specific) DES providers. DEEWR said that many specialist providers were very good at understanding the needs of their clients but were not successful enough at finding them jobs. They showed us some statistics from their database that showed that only about 20-30% of consumers who have received services from DES providers have been placed in jobs. This is a very low success rate.
Many people have said to us, and we have said many times to DEEWR, and said it again at the Consumer Day, that the $6,000 per person per year cap on interpreting from the Employment Assistance Fund (EAF) is not enough for some people. DEEWR seems to disagree, and they later sent me some information from their databases showing that the average amount spent on interpreting per EAF registered Auslan user (who is in a job) per year is $2,408. I need to talk more with DEEWR about this; averaging it out like this is not particularly the best approach as interpreting needs vary greatly between jobs and people. But it does seem to indicate that although we know the $6,000 cap is not enough for some people, it is more than enough for many. We need more research on this issue. [/accordion] [accordion title=”Key Priority 3: Access to information and media” active=”no”]

DisabilityCare Australia (NDIS)

In April we worked on the planning for a series of general awareness raising workshops about the NDIS in as many locations (including regional locations) as we can fit into the time available up to 30 June 2013. I will be out of the office a lot in May and June doing workshops in the community. These workshops are specifically for Deaf people and will be in Auslan. No interpreting will be provided – however, please let us know if you need a deafblind interpreter. Please keep an eye out for the information announcing locations and dates and check the Outlook blog entry.  And please come along to a workshop; the NDIS will bring big changes for Deaf people, and it is important that we are all prepared for these changes.

DDA Transport Standards

The Australian Federation of Disability Organisations (AFDO), of which Deaf Australia is a member, prepared a submission to the Review of the DDA Transport Standards. We sent comments about Deaf people’s needs to AFDO for inclusion in their submission. [/accordion] [accordion title=”Key Priority 4: Organisational stability and growth” active=”no”]
Emeritus Professor Des Power AM, died on 3 April, aged 77. Des Power was well known around the world as an educator and academic in the field of Deaf Education. He was also a consistent ally of Deaf Australia and a long-time supporter of Deaf people and their aspirations for more access and opportunity. He will be greatly missed by many including those of us at Deaf Australia who knew him well. Deaf Australia life members Breda Carty and Robert Adam collaborated on a wonderful obituary for Des from the point of view of Deaf people who knew him. You can see this obituary by clicking here.

Partnerships:

Deaf people from NESB/CALD backgrounds

On 16 April I met with the CEO of AMPARO – a Queensland advocacy organisation for people with disabilities from NESB/CALD backgrounds. AMPARO wants to work with us on a special project for families of Deaf people to learn Auslan. We will be talking further with them and with NEDA, the national organisation for this group of people.

World Federation of the Deaf

In April the WFD asked us to recommend a number of interpreters to possibly interpret at a meeting of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disability committee in Geneva in September this year. This meeting will discuss Australia’s report on its compliance with the UNCRPD. Deaf Australia does not have the resources to do a full scale formal recruitment process of interpreters, and we are already familiar with interpreters working at this level so we approached suitable interpreters directly and sent information to WFD.
Board member Ida Rogers has continued to work on arrangements for youths and youth leaders to attend the WFD Junior Youth Camp in Rome in July this year. We will now have two youths attending – Max Eyking and Anabelle Beasley. They will be accompanied by a youth leader, Shirley Liu. [/accordion] [/accordion_set]
[content_box style=”green” title=”About the contributor”] Karen Lloyd AM is Executive Officer of Deaf Australia. [/content_box]

The Captioning Working Group, an initiative of Deaf Australia, met for the first time on 2^nd May 2013 with representatives from Deaf Australia, Deaf Victoria, Deafness Forum of Australia, Action on Cinema Access, Australian Communications Consumer Action Network, Arts Access Victoria and Media Access Australia, to discuss captioning issues across all media formats.
The group agreed in principle the purposes of the Captioning Working Group which are:

• To work as a unified front to address captioning issues across various media formats;
• To undertake campaigns to promote increased access to caption content suitable for deaf and hard of hearing people in various formats; and
• To keep abreast of research and identify best practice for delivery of captioning.

Ann Darwin, President of Deaf Australia welcomed the group and outlined the challenges going forward for the deaf sector. She expressed the hope that this Captioning Working Group will work together to achieve outcomes in the best interests of our consumers.
Two key priorities identified at this initial meetings, were:

• The need to develop captioning principles, and
• Undertake a cooperative campaign on television caption quality.

Captioning Principles:
The group identified that there is a need for captioning principles to be developed that will set the framework for the Working Group and the industry to work within; this will create harmony between consumers and industry.
Cooperative Campaign:
Captions shown on broadcast programs usually receive few complaints from consumers, which leads the industry to believe that problems are not systemic and usually believe the fault is with the region for poor reception or technical issues. This cooperative campaign will identify several programs and coordinate complaints from the community so that regulators and networks can see when problems are systemic and that they may need to reassess how they approach these issues systemically.
Digital Inclusion and Disability Forum
Kyle Miers, the convenor, informed the group that Deaf Australia received an invitation to present at the Digital Inclusion and Disability Forum held in Melbourne this month.
Membership of the Working Group
We are looking to include one more organisation representative so this group is inclusive and representative of all people who are deaf and hard of hearing. We received one Expression of Interest from an independent community member and wish to seek for one more independent community member. Interested people should send their expression of interest to Karen Lloyd at [email protected].
The group will meet once every 3 months and will meet again in August.

DisabilityCare Australia, the national disability insurance scheme, will roll out – in full – across Queensland by July 2019.

The 9 May 2013 agreement between the Federal and Queensland Governments will see DisabilityCare Australia become a reality for around 97,000 Queenslanders with disability.
The Federal Government has now secured full agreements with most state and territory governments, meaning almost 90 per cent of Australians will be covered by DisabilityCare Australia.
DisabilityCare Australia is designed to give people with disability (and their families and carers) more choice and control over the supports they receive, and peace of mind that they’ll get the care and support they need in the event of significant and permanent disability, or if they have a child with disability that leaves them needing daily care and support.
To cover all people in Queensland, in 2019-20 the Queensland Government will provide $2.03 billion and the Australian Government will contribute around $2.14 billion to the scheme for Queenslanders.
This agreement builds on those with the governments of New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia, Tasmania and the Australian Capital Territory and the agreement to launch the scheme in the Barkly region of the Northern Territory.
The countdown to launch in New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania is on – it’s just over seven weeks away. Stay tuned to progress towards the launch by checking in on the website – www.ndis.gov.au – and we’ll continue to keep you updated through the Deaf Australia blog too.

Now in its third year, the annual cap that! campaign is focused on asking teachers all around Australia to turn on captions in schools to improve literacy and learning benefits for all students.

Captions are of great assistance for many Deaf and hearing impaired students.
Research has shown that captions can improve comprehension for students who use a language other than English as their first language, for struggling readers and for children with learning difficulties.
Captions are already available on many DVDs, online videos and TV programs, but many people are not aware that they are now being used in classrooms as a new way of teaching students with diverse learning needs.
cap that! are currently looking for teachers to become Captions Champions for 2013. Captions Champions receive a pack containing information to assist them start using captions in the classroom immediately and also to encourage their teaching colleagues to do the same. To complement the pack, the cap that! website provides lesson plan ideas and other resources. The lesson plans are designed around the Australian Curriculum subjects of maths, science, history and English and cater for Kindy through to Year 10. Each resource has a captioned element to it and most link directly to free captioned videos.
Captions Champions are kept up-to-date on the availability of new, captioned multimedia via a free newsletter and through the cap that! website content.
Captions Champion at St Clare of Assisi, ACT, Tiffany Reedy said, “Captions provide me with another teaching method I can use to improve learning outcomes around literacy. It’s something I hadn’t thought much about previously but since being a Captions Champion I’ve started to seek out educational videos with captions, and in doing so I’ve seen benefits for every student in the class.”
Visit www.capthat.com.au for your free Captions Champion pack and to access a range of resources for teachers, schools and parents.
cap that! is sponsored by the Australian Communication Exchange and proudly supported by National Literacy and Numeracy Week.

DisabilityCare is starting in July 2013 for some people in some areas in Tasmania, South Australia, NSW and Victoria.

It will start in the ACT and NT in July 2014 and in Queensland in 2016. It will become available for everyone in all states and territories except WA from about 2018. The Australian Government is still negotiating with WA. DisabilityCare will have a big impact on Deaf people. How you get services will be different.

Do you know what will be different? Come to a forum and find out.

Deaf Australia is holding a number of forums around Australia about the new DisabilityCare Australia (the National Disability Insurance Scheme – NDIS).
Generally, forums are specially for Deaf people and will be in Auslan. No interpreting will be provided – however, please let us know if you need a Deafblind interpreter.
Interpreters will be provided for the Darwin forum.
Refreshments will be provided.

Workshops for Northern QLD will be held:

Mackay – Thursday, 16 May 6.30pm to 8.30pm
George Street Neighbourhood Centre
4 George Street, Mackay
Townsville – Friday, 17 May 2012 – 7pm to 9 pm
Deaf Services Qld
111 Charters Towers Road, Townsville
Cairns – Saturday 18 May 2013 –  2.30pm to 4.30pm
Direct Employment Services
225 Sheridan Street, Cairns

Workshops for Victoria will be held:

Melbourne – Thursday, 23 May 6.00pm to 8.00pm
FJ Rose Auditorium, Deaf Children Australia
597 St Kilda Road, Melbourne
Bendigo – Tuesday, 11 June 2013 – 6pm to 8pm
Bendigo Health’s Havlin St East Complex
37 Havlin St East, Bendigo
Ballarat – Wednesday 12 June 2013 –  6pm to 8pm
The Boardroom, Ballarat Business Centre
Ballarat Business Centre
15 Dawson Street South, Ballarat

Workshops for South Australia will be held:

Adelaide – Saturday 22 June 2013 – 2.00pm to 5.00pm
Deaf Community Hall,
262 South Terrace, Adelaide

Workshops for Northern Territory will be held:

Darwin – Thursday 6 June 2013 – 6pm to 8pm
DeafNT office
Shop 14B Casuarina Plaza, 258 Trower Road, Casuarina

Workshops for NSW will be held:

Sydney – Monday 27 May 2013 – 6pm to 8pm
Sydney Mechanics’ School of Arts – L1 Carmichael Room
280 Pitt Street, Sydney

Workshops for Qld will be held:

Brisbane – Wednesday 26 June 2013 – 6pm to 8pm
Deaf Services Qld
915 Ipswich Road, Moorooka
Brisbane Seniors – Thursday 27 June 2013 – 12.30pm for 1pm start
Mary Mac Hall
616 Ipswich Road, Annerley

Deaf Australia is always a hive of activity, busy with all sorts of tasks; working hard to make life better for Deaf people. Read more here about what we’ve been up to lately.

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National Summit on Early Intervention & Education for Deaf & Hard of Hearing Children, Canberra, 29 & 30 November 2012

The report from the summit has been received from strategic planning company Grant Thornton and we have sent it to the Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs (FaHCSIA). Once FaHCSIA has approved it, we will make it available publicly, including sending it directly to everyone who registered for the summit. The next step will be to work out our action plan for putting the identified strategies into action.

Employment

On Monday 4 March, Bill Shorten, Minister for Workplace Relations, was on Q&A on ABC TV and was asked a question about the $6,000 per year cap on support that people can get from the Employment Assistance Fund. The question was asked by a Deaf person and was specifically about interpreting. She made the point that $6,000 per year does not go far. Mr Shorten said he would take it on board. On Tuesday 5 March I sent additional information about this issue to Mr Shorten, and further encouraged him to investigate possible improvements. [/accordion] [accordion title=”Key Priority 3: Access to information and media” active=”no”]

DisabilityCare Australia (NDIS)

On 18 March I had a discussion with a member of the NDIS Taskforce about the NDIS Rules and provided some feedback from a Deaf community perspective.
Late in February the Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs (FaHCSIA) offered us $8,000 to help us to consult with the Deaf community about the NDIS Rules and to conduct community engagement activities to raise awareness about the NDIS between now and 30 June 2013.
We started this work by developing a series of short videos about the NDIS Rules. In three days we managed to summarise many pages of information on seven sets of rules into one – two pages of key information about each set of rules, and film them in Auslan. The videos are on Youtube and on our blog deafaustralia.org.au
We also worked with our state branches and some of our board members to quickly organise and hold workshops about the rules and provide feedback to government by 22 March. We managed to hold workshops in Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth and we sent a lot of excellent feedback to government. Our thanks to board members and state branches who worked quickly with us to make these workshops happen, to all the people who came along to the workshops at such short notice, and to those people who viewed the videos online and sent us feedback. Your input was very valuable and was sent to government.
We are now planning a series of general awareness raising workshops about the NDIS in as many locations, including regional locations, as we can fit into the time available up to 30 June 2013. Please keep an eye out for the flyers announcing locations and dates and check our blog at deafaustralia.org.au

Captioning Working Group

Captioning on various media has long been a major issue of concern for Deaf and hard of hearing people. Over the years, Deaf Australia has had a sub-committee of members interested in captioning issues, which achieved some progress on these issues, and captioning is currently included in our strategic plan’s Key Priorities.
Deaf Australia’s board has recognised that the issues require more collaboration with other relevant organisations and community groups in order to achieve further desired outcomes. So during March we worked on the preparations for setting up a Captioning Working Group and invited six other organisations and community groups to send a representative to this Working Group. Organisations/community groups invited are:

• Deaf Victoria
• Deafness Forum
• Action on Cinema Access (AOCA)
• Media Access Australia
• Arts Access Victoria
• ACCAN

We also sent out a call for expressions of interest in two independent individual community representatives.
The purpose of this Working Group is to bring together like-minded organisations and community groups to work co-operatively to:

1. Work as a unified front to address captioning issues across various media formats;
2. Undertake campaigns to promote increased access to captioned content suitable for Deaf and hard of hearing people in various media formats; and
3. Keep abreast of research and identify best practice for delivery of captioning.

Kyle Miers will convene the Working Group on Deaf Australia’s behalf and Deaf Australia will provide secretariat support as outlined in the Terms of Reference, which are available on our website www.deafau.org.au The Working Group will be based in Melbourne, for practical reasons, but will work in the interests of caption users Australia-wide. The first meeting of the Working Group will be held on Thursday 2 May 2013.

Accessible Cinema Advisory Group (ACAG)

Cathy Clark represented Deaf Australia at the ACAG meeting on 15 March. Information from this meeting will be available on our blog soon.

AHRC ‘20 years, 20 stories’

Following on from the launch of the ‘20 years, 20 stories’ DVD celebrating 20 years of the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) in February, state Anti-Discrimination Commissions have been holding state based celebrations. The Queensland celebration was held in Brisbane on 18th March and I was invited to join a panel discussing the impact the DDA has had in the past 20 years and what further changes are needed. You can see the videos on the AHRC website by clicking here [/accordion]
[accordion title=”Key Priority 4: Organisational stability and growth” active=”no”]

Partnerships:

During March 2013 we worked with several other organisations – Macquarie University, Northern Melbourne Institute of Technology (NMIT), Heriot Watt University (Edinburgh), Deaf Society of NSW, Vicdeaf and ASLIA – to prepare a funding application for a project to develop standards for Auslan translations, which was sent to ACCAN. This is an update of a funding application we submitted to ACCAN last year. We hope that it will be successful this year. Special thanks to Della Goswell at Macquarie University and Cathy Clark at NMIT for their commitment to making sure this was done on time, including working on it over the Easter break.

World Federation of the Deaf

One of our board members, Ida Rogers has been working hard on the call for applications from youths and youth leaders to attend the WFD Junior Youth Camp in Rome in July this year. The lucky youths who will be going are Max Eyking and Anabelle Beasley, and the youth leader accompanying them is Shirley Liu.

AOCA

In March we were contacted by the community group Action on Cinema Access (AOCA) and were asked to clarify our current approach to cinema accessibility, in particular in relation to some specific issues. We were also advised that AOCA planned to withdraw from the ACAG at the meeting on 15 March.
In response I sent the following information to AOCA and I include it here in the interest of open and transparent information sharing:

1. Deaf Australia’s position has always been that open captioning is the preferred format. We have said this from the very start when cinema captioning was first investigated back in 1999/2000 when the first trial was held. (What we mean by ‘open captions’ is what some people in AOCA are now referring to as ‘on-screen captions’.)
2. We negotiated for years with the cinemas to try to increase/improve the number of venues, the number and variety of films available, session times, and resolve a number of other issues including lack of advertising and inaccurate advertising. All of this was in relation to open captioned films. Closed captioning was never discussed except once that I recall when a hearing person said that Rear Window would be better and we disagreed. The big 4 cinemas have always been extremely difficult to work with from the very start.
3. Since the roll out of Captiview (which was a deal made between government and the big 4, Deaf Australia was not involved in negotiating this deal) our position has always been based on the information available to us at the time we made public statements in our newsletters etc.
   • From the beginning, we said that we support the roll out, the increase in the number of venues was great, but that the captiview technology would not be suitable for everyone (and just so you know where I personally stand on this, I personally dislike Captiview and have done from the first time I saw it when it was launched; I believe this may also be true of both our current and previous representatives on ACAG; however in my job, and in their role as representatives, we must speak for the community as a whole, not just our own personal views). From the beginning we have also said that the cinemas must investigate new technology as it becomes available.
   • We have in the past been asked for our position on Captiview and we have published articles in our newsletters saying that based on the information available to us at that time we believed that Captiview was the best available technology currently or at that time. The “currently” and “at that time” caveat seems to be overlooked by those who misunderstand or misinterpret our position. We have also consistently said publicly that the cinemas must investigate new technology when it becomes available.
   • We have also pointed out problems with the current technology, staff training etc in cinemas. We have done this consistently on ACAG, and at an ACAG meeting last year your representative Cathy Clark offered to work with Veronica Pardo from AAV to identify a suitable training program that can be adapted for cinema staff. She showed me a program they had identified, one day last year when I was Melbourne, but I’m not sure where they are currently up to on this.
4. We agree that issues of technology not working, staff training, advertising etc are ongoing problems. They have always been problems even before Captiview and were issues that we were trying for years to get the cinemas to improve – see point 2 above.  We agree that these problems seem to be getting worse.
5. We understand that many people don’t like Captiview / it doesn’t suit them because of height, eye focus issues etc. We also understand that there are people who do like it. And we also understand that there are people who are prepared to put up with it in the absence of something better. It remains our view that open captions are the preferred option.
6. We have previously, in emails and face to face, told AOCA that we basically agree on what the problems are and that open captions are preferred. What we have not been able to agree on is the strategies for advocating for a better deal. AOCA seems to believe that a quick fix is possible and that if we complain enough and loudly enough it will get fixed. We understand that everyone wants this fixed ASAP – and so do we. I’d love to be able to tick this off my very long to-do list and move on to other issues that also need attention.However, based on all of our experience, a quick fix is unlikely to happen with the big 4 cinemas. Making a lot of noise publicly and constantly complaining isn’t necessarily going to bring a quick fix, in fact sometimes it does the opposite and causes the ‘enemy’ to dig in and stop listening. With advocacy some things do unfortunately take a long time and in advocacy we need to be able to cope with the constant frustration and disappointment. Just as comparisons, it took us 10 years to convince government to fund the National Relay Service (NRS) and 8 years to convince them to include SMS emergency call service and Video Relay Service in the NRS.  Funding to establish the National Auslan Booking and Payment Service (NABS) only took us 2 years. So you never can tell how long something is going to take but most things don’t happen quickly. We need the community to understand this better.
7. Deaf Australia has been in there advocating for cinema captioning and improvements since the late 1990s. We have always been and we remain committed for the long haul. The issues are a lot more complex than many people seem to understand. The advocacy we do is not always seen or understood by everyone, and we do need to do better at publicising what we do, but we have been there working on cinema access and we will remain there working on it.
8. The current problem is not ACAG itself. The problem is the big 4 cinemas. They are not, and never have been as committed as we want them to be, we have always had to drag them kicking and screaming to the next step. If AOCA withdraws from ACAG, that is, of course, their decision. However, we do not believe that it will lead the cinemas to improve their ways. Cathy Clark will be attending the meeting as Deaf Australia’s representative with the message that the cinemas need to lift their game, but we won’t be withdrawing from ACAG, we don’t believe this will result in any improvements, it will simply put us on the outside of the negotiation process.
9. For your information, we are also about to set up a working group of interested people to work with us on strategies for getting open captioning into independent cinemas. I need to do a few things first but I will be in contact with you and also Deafness Forum and others about this in due course. It would be great if we could harness some of the community enthusiasm and channel it into some fresh approaches to the issue, so we hope that AOCA will join us on this.

Following this, AOCA is still a member of the ACAG and will send a representative to the Captioning Working Group. We look forward to continuing to work with them in constructive ways on captioning issues. [/accordion] [/accordion_set]
[content_box style=”green” title=”About the contributor”] Karen Lloyd AM is Executive Officer of Deaf Australia. [/content_box]