“It is frustrating to watch. I see their lips moving but I do not know what they are saying.”
Sari Hirvonen-Skarbö is a selective television viewer. She is hearing-impaired and chooses her programmes based on whether they have subtitles. Many domestic programmes do not.
“I would like to follow current affairs programmes in particular. It is truly annoying when there are interesting programmes on TV but I cannot make out what they are saying.”
An amendment to the law on television and radio broadcasting is now in the making that should help Hirvonen-Skarbö.
According to the amendment draft, the television channels have to ensure that also the hearing and vision-impaired can follow the programmes.
In all, there are around 700,000 hearing-impaired and 80,000 vision-impaired individuals in Finland.
The motion will be presented to Parliament this spring.
Currently, the Finnish Broadcasting Company YLE supplies a third of its programmes with subtitles, excluding sports and children’s programmes. The commercial television stations provide only their foreign-language programming with subtitles.
For the hearing-impaired the subtitles are an equality question. “It is also a democracy and participation issue”, says lawyer Pamela Sarasmo of the Finnish Federation of the Hard of Hearing (FFHOH).
The commercial television stations are bewildered by the motion. In their view the supplying of programmes with subtitles is a matter of public service and therefore belongs to the state-run YLE.
The Ministry of Transport and Communications estimates that the provision of subtitles would cost EUR 200,000 per commercial channel per year. The commercial channels estimate the cost at over a million per year.
Live broadcasts are technically the most challenging to be supplied with subtitles.
YLE and VTT (the Technical Research Centre of Finland) are currently looking into a system that would directly transform Finnish speech into text.
YLE suspects that it will be able to provide all of its programmes with Finnish subtitles by the year 2015.
For the vision-impaired YLE already has a system in use that will convert the foreign-language programmes’ Finnish subtitles into Finnish speech.
