2018/0414/B
EC/EFTA
BE Belgium
  • SERV - SERVICES 98/48/CE
2018-11-22
2018-08-28

Services

Regulation of the Advisory College of the Higher Audiovisual Council of the French Community on the accessibility of programmes for people with sensory deprivation

The purpose of the notified text is to bolster a policy, in the French Community, of improving access to audiovisual media services by people with sensory disabilities, taking into account technological developments and consumer habits.

It includes, on the one hand, obligations for providers of television services (‘editors’, in the terminology of Belgian regulations), who must develop the service they offer by making their content accessible. On the other hand, the distributors, as intermediaries between editors and users, must render this accessibility effective.

Only the distributors’ obligations fall within the scope of Directive (EU) 2015/1535, and these are therefore the subject of this notification. Depending on the situation, these may be means or results-related obligations (in the interest of ensuring that the measures taken are proportional), namely:

a) the obligation to provide users, for no additional charge, with all of the programmes made accessible by editors falling under the competence of the French Community with whom they have concluded a distribution agreement. Distributors shall bear the cost of the necessary technical provisions. This results-based obligation is replaced by an obligation to make all efforts to achieve this aim in the case of editors not falling within the competence of the French Community (Article 13);

b) the obligation to make all efforts to facilitate the use of navigation menus in order to enable people with sensory disabilities to have swift and comprehensible access to accessibility features (Article 14);

c) the obligation to embed a pictogram corresponding to the type of accessibility available (Article 16) in electronic programme guides (including the catalogues of non-linear services);

d) the obligation to clearly identify the track intended to be used for audio description (Article 17);

e) the obligation to communicate, through the use of pictograms (Article 18), information relating to programmes that have been made accessible, particularly on their website or mobile applications.