IDMIF informs MIB about content accessibility steps taken for people with disabilities

The Indian Digital Media Industry Foundation (IDMIF) has written a letter to MIB about how its members have been making efforts to promote accessibility and taking measures voluntarily to make their content more accessible for people with disabilities.

The letter comes after the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting sought inputs regarding the formulation of accessibility standards from self-regulatory bodies of Online Curated Content Publishers (OCCPs).

In the letter, accessed by e4m, the IDMIF (a subsidiary body of the Indian Broadcasting and Digital Foundation), highlighted the importance of accessibility measures in ensuring that people with disabilities can access and enjoy the content that they publish.

“We are sensitive towards the fact that accessibility is important because it ensures that people with disabilities can access and enjoy the content of our member OCCPs.  We, as well as our members, are committed to working with the Government of India to promote accessibility in a reasonable and practically feasible manner, while balancing the demands of content broadcasting and viewers’ convenience. 

“IDMIF member OCCPs have been making efforts to promote accessibility and are increasingly adopting measures on a voluntary basis for making content accessible,” the letter said.

Listing out the accessibility measures for content, IDMIF said that it is providing subtitling for a majority of content for a textual representation of dialogue and is increasing the offering of closed captioning (CC), which includes descriptions of other sounds in addition to dialogue.

It said in the letter that certain IDMIF members also provide audio descriptors (AD), which allow viewers to hear a description of what is on screen in addition to the dialogue in a scene.

For navigation, some OCCPs have enabled a text control feature which allows the text on mobile applications to be resized up to 200 per cent without affecting functionality, the body told the ministry.

It said that some members are working to provide screen reader support, which allows users to hear the text displayed on the screen for basic platform navigation.

Member OCCPs also highlighted challenges to implementing accessibility measures for live content (due to technological restrictions) and archival and licensed content (due to issues related to rights).

The IDMIF members also underscored their support for MIB’s objective of making services accessible and noted that OCCPs will continue to provide accessibility in line with the Code of Ethics under the IT Rules.

The members of IDMIF have recommended that the self-regulatory bodies are best placed to outline a vision and potential roadmap for making content more accessible, given the crucial role they play in the industry and their knowledge of members’ operations and requirements.

IDMIF is a subsidiary of the Indian Broadcasting and Digital Foundation (IBDF), representing leading OCCPs and working on policy advocacy and content regulation through the self regulatory body Digital Media Content Regulatory Council (DMCRC).