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Wendy Youens' head and shoulders with logos of audio description and closed captioning
Departing Able NZ chief executive Wendy Youens (Photo: Supplied / Tina Tiller)

MediaMay 16, 2022

Able and the battle to make NZ television accessible to all

Wendy Youens' head and shoulders with logos of audio description and closed captioning
Departing Able NZ chief executive Wendy Youens (Photo: Supplied / Tina Tiller)

After nine years at its helm, Wendy Youens is stepping down from Able New Zealand, the organisation that provides captioning and audio descriptions for locally made TV. She spoke to Duncan Greive about the job on The Fold.

Since I’ve been doing my media podcast The Fold, I’ve received regular correspondence from people about accessibility, and why I didn’t ask, say, Kevin Kenrick, the former TVNZ CEO, about the ability of TVNZ OnDemand viewers to get the same captioning experience as people who watch on linear.

My guest this week is one of the best people in New Zealand to talk to about that; about what we’re getting right when it comes to accessibility and TV, and where we could be doing better. Wendy Youens is – for another couple of weeks, at least – the chief executive of Able New Zealand, a trust that provides captioning and audio description services for broadcast media.

Below is an edited excerpt of our conversation – read the full transcript of my conversation with Wendy Youens here.


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Could you start by explaining what Able is and how it came about? It’s an organisation that might be invisible to a lot of people, but it does an incredibly important job.

Able is an independent, not for profit organisation. We’re fully funded by New Zealand On Air to provide closed captioning and audio description for TV broadcasters, and we have been around for about nine years now.

The services that we provide used to be provided by a department that was nested within TVNZ, and back in 2013 TVNZ went through a process of streamlining their business and focusing on becoming this very commercial sort of machine. TVNZ essentially made the business decision to outsource what we were doing, and we worked with New Zealand On Air to set up able as an independent organisation. We launched back in late 2013 and have been working from Able ever since.

Do you feel like the importance of accessibility is well understood by the media broadly?

Certainly the awareness of accessibility is growing. I think the major media organisations and TV broadcasters – TVNZ and Discovery, Sky or Prime, who we provide services for – they absolutely value and know that captioning and audio description are really important services for a huge number of people in our community.

But I think what’s not happening at the moment is the prioritisation of disability over all the other important things that major media organisations are dealing with. What we’ve found at Able is that generally, media organisations don’t do anything they don’t have to do, and particularly anything that’s going to cost them money. We’re lucky to have New Zealand On Air funding to support Able’s services, but we do rely on broadcasters having the capability to actually broadcast captioning and audio description and that is currently not consistent. At the moment you have situations where you have something that might be captioned or audio described on broadcast TV and then it’s not available on an on-demand platform, for instance.

I’ve heard that a whole bunch of times: the on-demand space, which is where all the gravity’s heading, is actually paradoxically a real lottery as to whether accessibility exists.

That’s exactly right. And the technology is there, so absolutely it’s possible to have captioning and audio description on an online platform. Netflix does it really well, 100% of content on Netflix is captioned and pretty large portion of the content is audio described. So it’s very possible. It’s just that broadcasters have to prioritise that.

Broadcasters currently are not really grasping is the size of that audience. You have 38% of New Zealanders who use captions on a regular basis, and 7% of New Zealanders use audio description on a regular basis. That’s a huge number of people and we actually know that over half of those people are not using it for the obvious reasons. Closed captioning obviously benefits the Deaf and hard of hearing community, but there’s a huge range of other people that use captions as well. People that are learning English, people that are struggling to hear for any reason, people, you know, scrolling through videos on public transport are using captions so that they don’t have to listen to the content.

And so captions actually have a much wider benefit, and the same for audio description. I think broadcasters and New Zealand are still just really only at the very early stages of getting to grips with the size of that audience and that potential audience if they were to make their content accessible.

We’re speaking, I think, a week or two before you finish up as chief executive of an organisation that you essentially started and has been a really defining focus of your career. What it was that drew you to the accessibility space?

When I first started at TVNZ in 2007 [as a caption producer], I had no real concept of captioning and who produced them. I guess I just imagined they were just there, but there’s actually a team of very skilled and dedicated people producing those captions. As soon as I joined the team, I thought, “I’ve found my dream job” and just loved that we were providing a service that made a difference.

As my career has progressed and I’ve moved into more management, I’ve loved the opportunity to connect with the communities that we serve and learn so much about the importance of captioning and audio description to people and to people’s lives. Because the services we provide, even though in some ways it’s providing access to entertainment or news, important information, it’s also just about social inclusion and enabling people that rely on those access services to be totally included in New Zealand television and New Zealand content.

That’s one of the things I love about media: it’s this thing that can, at its best, tie us together or prompt conversation and so on. Is there a particular instance of [that sort of social inclusion] that stands out in your memory?

I think the Christchurch earthquakes really drove home the importance of access to information at a time of crisis. Providing live-captioning for the rolling news coverage was pretty difficult. But knowing and hearing from people around the country that were relying on those captions really drove home the importance of access to information that was critical for people to have. People around the country were waiting to find out if their families were OK. They were waiting for civil defence information, and providing that service felt extremely important, and really drove it home.

In terms of our audio description service, which benefits the people who are blind or have low vision, I attended this event soon after we launched the audio description service, and I remember chatting to this woman who was blind and was telling me how much she loved a David Attenborough series, Africa, that we had audio described. And I had previously thought that audio description didn’t really add a lot to documentary, that by its nature is descriptive. And she was explaining to me that she had visited Africa 10 years previously and that listening to the audio description and just the richness of description really brought back so many memories for her and enriched that whole viewing experience.

And it really just reminded me that we’re connecting people with stories, but also stories that connect into their lives, and that’s super important.

Keep going!
Image: Tina Tiller
Image: Tina Tiller

MediaMay 13, 2022

TVNZ-RNZ likely to be detached from NZ On Air in biggest media reforms since 1989

Image: Tina Tiller
Image: Tina Tiller

Budget 2022: The big, hybrid public broadcaster will be funded directly for local commissioning, sources have told The Spinoff. That means a shrunken NZ on Air, and a seismic change in our public media funding model, writes Duncan Greive.

Since its creation in the late 1980s, NZ on Air has been the most important player by far in delivering public funding for local television, radio and, latterly, digital media. Next week’s budget is likely to signal the end of that extraordinary dominance, however, several well-placed sources have told The Spinoff, with the merger of TVNZ and RNZ into a single, super-sized public broadcaster. The new public media entity – or “PME”, in the shorthand of government and media circles – is expected to be funded directly by government to support local content that cannot be fully commercially bankrolled, they say.

As it stands, RNZ is bulk funded through NZ on Air, while a raft of local content on TVNZ – everything from Q+A to The Casketeers to One Lane Bridge – hinges on contestable funds from NZ on Air. The reforms would see the new public broadcaster commissioning major dramas, comedies and other content for the first time in more than three decades. Out of the funding patchwork for the PME, NZ on Air’s remit and budget would accordingly shrink.

How much by will be revealed on budget day – those spoken to by The Spinoff suggest that there is likely to be some increase in funding to NZ on Air which will partially offset the dramatic loss of the pūtea which previously flowed through it to TVNZ and RNZ. Key to all this intrigue is the establishment board setting up the PME, which made the recommendations which will flow through cabinet and into the budget which funds this work. For many in the industries that create scripted and factual content that reflects Aotearoa back to its people, these changes are as significant as the merger itself.

If the budget follows through on these recommendations, the reforms will have a major impact on New Zealand’s near-unique system of funding public media content, which has proven surprisingly durable for a radical reform enacted by future Act party founder Richard Prebble. Rather than a single public media platform like Australia’s ABC or Britain’s BBC, New Zealand has a decentralised public media model, in which private production companies pitch content to TV channels, radio stations and online platforms. If the pitch is successful, those media companies then support the application to NZ On Air, which makes the ultimate decision about whether to fund the production of that content. While there has been a persistent critique of the system over decades, and the previous Labour government tried reform through a charter, nothing at this scale has been attempted since the days of the NZBC.

The change means the end of what one source spoken to by The Spinoff called the “sham contestability” of the current set-up. The “sham” part is that because television has always taken the vast majority of the funding pie, the TV networks could rely on a reasonably predictable amount of funding for their content, particularly when it came to the renewal of successful shows. This meant the actual amount of truly contestable funding was far lower than the $180m budget overseen by NZ On Air. Crucially, sources suggest that the new PME will be unable to apply for NZ on Air funding – eliminating the potential “double dipping” between two pots of public media funding.

What does it mean for TVNZ/RNZ?

If enacted, this will be cause for celebration in commissioning departments at both entities. No longer will they have to wait for the next NZ on Air funding round, and then wait longer for a decision. Instead budgets will be concrete and knowable and – as one source spoken to by The Spinoff emphasised – this will have a huge impact on the agility of the new entity.

It will be able to commission content far more confidently and at greater speed, and keep teams together that might otherwise have had to wait for long periods between funding rounds – particularly if the network was putting up an important project with which another idea might be seen as competing for funding. The relationship between TVNZ and NZ On Air has not always been cordial, and this will remove a persistent headache and tension point from the lives of the PME’s commissioners.

What does it mean for NZ On Air?

A clue to this outcome came on an unheralded note on the Ministry for Culture and Heritage’s website in March. “While NZ On Air will not directly fund the new entity, it will still have an oversight role by working collaboratively with the new entity to identify duplication and gaps in the provision of public media content” – indicating a not-uncomplicated relationship between the PME and NZ on Air, in which each will have some visibility but not control over the productions being funded. How this will work in practise is hard to imagine, as neither is likely to want to back away from supporting content tagged for funding.

In the main these changes are likely to make NZ on Air’s job more manageable. While it is inevitable that its overall budget falls, the funder will in some ways have greater control over what is put out into the private sector media than ever before. This is in part due to an increase in a budget that now has to serve everyone except the PME, but also because it will no longer have the unofficial constraint of having to keep a certain proportion of its budget allocated to the major TV networks. With a new system for measuring audience and impact nearing completion, it can more confidently fulfil its various missions around diverse audiences and storytelling in a less constrained way. (NZ On Air declined to comment for this story, as did broadcasting minister Kris Faafoi.)

What does it mean for the production sector?

Ultimately, under the current system, all roads lead to NZ On Air. With the new system an array of incredibly powerful PME commissioners will appear and start taking lunches. They will have their own budgets and fiefdoms and an ability to make the kind of fast, responsive decisions that have been much more difficult under the current system. The production sector will be extremely pleased to make the new commissioners’ acquaintance.

Yet increased budgets sector-wide, and a general desire to meet audiences underserved by the current public media system (read: young, Māori, Pacific and pan-Asian) everywhere should mean a greater openness to innovation and more opportunity for startup content companies to grow if they can prove a path to audiences.

One big caveat: all this is predicated on the PME making use of the production sector. Historically TVNZ’s internal production – shows it makes itself – has waxed and waned, while RNZ has made almost all its content in-house. Will the new entity look to return to a situation where it makes much more of what it distributes? It’s entirely possible. In which case the production sector could find a far less joyous scenario than it has been banking on.

What does it mean for Three and the rest of the private media?

Three’s new owners Discovery have a pretty good position – they can commission content funded by the taxpayer, and if it’s a hit, likely pick up the rights to screen it on Discovery channels and platforms all over the world. All the other private sector media players will be open to this new arrangement on the face of it – particularly those which operate online. The TV networks have always dominated funding, which has not grown commensurate with population over the past 30 years.

These lines travel in different directions (image: The Spinoff/Infogram)

Without TVNZ and RNZ in the pot, and new management at Discovery and Sky, the old entrenched players are gone and a truly contestable era, with fast flow through different shows and a greater potential for online content, is upon us. The chances of new platforms being founded, with more social-first shows or direct-to-content-creator funding, have increased exponentially as a result. (Also increasing: the blurriness of the line delineating Creative NZ, NZ On Air and the NZ Film Commission – this could be the next reform battleground).

What could it mean for viewers?

It will certainly mean more NZ content is created, likely a greater volume than at any point in our history. The trick will be getting us to watch it. Measuring like-for-like audience size anywhere is difficult, but it’s crucial that some standardised metrics are agreed across all parties here – because every future budget will become a contest between the PME and NZ on Air, with both competing for audiences – and for the most compelling narrative about how well they serve the broadest possible swath of Aotearoa. After years of dithering – remember RNZ+? – there is finally potential for some clarity around the future of the our audio-video media. And with it, a chance for an epic new contest for attention.


Follow Duncan Greive’s NZ media podcast The Fold on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your favourite podcast provider.

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