Czechia

[CZ] Recommendations for broadcasters to prepare Action Plans for making television programmes accessible for people with hearing impairments and people with visual impairments

IRIS 2023-9:1/20

Jan Fučík

Česká televize

The regulatory body, the Council for Radio and Television Broadcasting, has issued a Recommendation to broadcasters and operators of on-demand audiovisual services for the preparation of Action Plans for making television programmes accessible to persons with hearing impairments and persons with visual impairments (hereafter “Action Plans”) for the period from 1 July 2023 to 30 June 2025.

The draft Action Plans must be discussed with organisations associating persons with hearing impairments and persons with visual impairments. The result of negotiations between the operator and the representative organisations should optimally be a mutual agreement on the final form of the Action Plan. If such an agreement is not reached, the Action Plan should contain information on the fact that discussions with the representing organisations took place, but no mutual agreement was found in the context of the Action Plan. In such a case, the Action Plan should contain information on the diverging positions of the representing organisations and of the operator. It should contain the operator's justification as to why the requirements of the representative organisation are not feasible, and, at the same time, a specification of the operator's commitment to make it available.

The accessibility obligations will be formulated in the Action Plan by specifying a percentage of the programmes that will be made accessible. The share of programmes made available will always be calculated on the basis of the total broadcasting time of the programme over a period of one year. This will be the period from 1 July 2023 to 30 June 2024 and the period from 1 July 2024 to 30 June 2025 . The Action Plan should explicitly state details of the means by which these  programmes will be made accessible to the hearing and visually impaired. Therefore, it should be explicitly stated that the programmes will be made accessible to people with visual impairments through audio descriptions. Other reasonable measures may also be stated and justified. In the case of accessibility for people with hearing impairments, the Action Plan should state what proportion of the accessible programmes will be accessible through closed captions, open captions, interpretation into Czech sign language or other, explicitly stated and justified, reasonable measures.