Deaf advocate Hope Cotton has delivered a petition to Parliament today calling on the Government to introduce legal captioning standards in New Zealand.
“Over 800,000 Deaf and hard of hearing Kiwis have inequitable access to media because there is no legal requirement to caption in New Zealand,” Cotton said.
Cotton, a year 13 student from Upper Hutt, is nearly completely Deaf in her left ear and suffers from severe tinnitus.
"I have grown up in a very inaccessible education system, it’s been very difficult for me, and I've had to advocate for myself every step of the way,” Cotton said.
In Australia, England, and America, closed captioning is required by law. But, in New Zealand, there is no legal requirement to caption.
Green MP Chlöe Swarbrick accepted the petition at Parliament this afternoon and told 1News that New Zealand is lagging in this area.
"This is an opportunity to get it right and make sure that going through this massive process to overhaul public media in this country, that we ensure that, that entity and that the content that’s produced by it is accessible to all New Zealanders, which surely is the point." Swarbrick said.
The petition was supported by National, the Greens, and ACT, but no representative from Labour showed up.
Cotton said she often struggles in class because the educational video resources are not captioned.
"If we have video resources in class, I will have to go home and re-watch them about three or four times to actually get the main information," she said.
"When you’re trying to learn about like the Vietnam War and then your captions say things about like helicopters and unicorns and rainbows it gets a bit confusing and its quite difficult," she said.
In a statement Broadcasting Minister Willie Jackson said the Government is committed to increasing access to captioning and audio description in Aotearoa.
"It is important that any regulatory change aligns with broader reforms to the current media content regime and so, I intend to progress work on captioning and audio description in parallel with the broader review of content regulation,” Jackson said.
Swarbrick and Cotton both said it was discriminatory that there isn’t already a legal requirement for closed captions in New Zealand.
It is the second time the Deaf community has campaigned for captioning standards.
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