E-Access Bulletin Live

Accessibility features for “connected TVs” or “smart TVs” – television sets which can access internet content – are being examined by a working group from the Digital TV Group (DTG), the UK’s industry association for digital television.

The work will include an updating of guidelines first published in a 2011 TV usability document from the DTG usability group, which has been renamed the accessibility group to incorporate wider interests.

“The UK Digital TV Usability and Accessibility Guidelines” – nicknamed the U-Book – offer advice for manufacturers of digital TV receiving equipment on how to incorporate accessibility features into their products, including audio description services and text-to-speech conversion. The DTG accessibility group will be updating the U-Book in the autumn to include internet content on TVs.

“The guidelines are intended to document the best practice for supporting accessibility and are there to provide a reference tool for industry”, Simon Gauntlett, Technology Director at DTG, told E-Access Bulletin.

“Increasingly, we will see the integration of TV services and web-based content, and it is essential that, in the development of new types of services, accessibility is not compromised.”

The U-Book is available by email on request from the DTG website.

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 8th, 2012 at 12:26 pm and is filed under Broadcasting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.