Learning articles

Sarah is your potential customer.  

She is a vibrant social media influencer who happens to be blind. Sarah loves sharing her daily experiences, tips on living independently, and product reviews with her followers. Despite her active presence on social media, she often feels left out of the conversation when it comes to advertisements. Most ads she encounters are heavily visual, lacking the necessary audio descriptions or alternative text, making it impossible for her to fully engage with the content.

One day, Sarah missed out on a fantastic promotion for her favourite organic cleaning products because the ad was purely visual, with no accompanying description. This wasn’t an isolated incident. From missing out on limited-time food offers to not knowing about the latest hair care products, Sarah’s experience underscores a significant gap in how brands reach their audiences.  Sarah’s story highlights a crucial point: when brands fail to make their advertisements accessible, they exclude potential customers like her.

Touch Card is Mastercard’s new card designed exclusively with blind and low-vision people in mind. It’s changing the way millions of people interact with their daily tasks.

In this article, you'll find advice on various elements of subtitling and style guide. This is based on broadcaster advice.

Over the last two decades the UK has seen huge advances in the amount of accessible content on television and video on-demand (VoD) services. Audiences, including (but not limited to) disabled people, now expect support in the form of subtitles, audio description and signing (collectively ‘access services’). This looks set to continue, with VoD accessibility requirements on the way1 and rapid developments in technology like voice recognition making it ever easier to create access services. But with this progress comes a challenge - how do we ensure that these access services are of high quality and truly serving their purpose?

This statement sets out changes we have made to the Ofcom TV access services code (“the Code”) which sets out the statutory requirements, and the accompanying best practice guidelines (“the Guidelines”) which give recommendations on ensuring the quality and usability of access services. The changes follow extensive engagement with user groups, industry and accessibility experts, a public consultation and large-scale qualitative research we commissioned to explore the expectations and preferences of disabled audiences.

Ofcom commissioned the Research Institute for Disabled Consumers (RiDC) to conduct research with people with different access needs, exploring their use of, attitudes towards, and preferences for access services (subtitles, audio description, and signing) across broadcast TV and Video on Demand (VoD) services. This report details the findings which have supported Ofcom’s accessibility best practice guidelines (which have been updated and expanded to cover VoD accessibility). The research has also helped Ofcom further develop recommendations, which include wider audience engagement with access services, beyond those with sight and hearing loss, for whom access services are expected to primarily serve.
These findings are based on 55 in-depth interviews with people with hearing loss, sight loss, dual-sensory loss (both hearing and sight loss), British Sign Language (BSL users) and cognitive and neurodevelopmental conditions. Fieldwork was conducted between June and November 2023. The findings presented in this report should not be considered a reflection of the views or opinions of Ofcom or RiDC but the views and opinions of the respondents interviewed, as well as their experiences and perceptions of various broadcaster and on-demand services' functionalities. We would like to thank broadcasters for the use of images within this research, which were used during fieldwork and have been
included in this report for illustrative purposes only.