Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, what progress he has made on setting targets for on-demand broadcasters to provide subtitles and audio description for people with sensory loss.

The government is committed to seeing an improvement in the levels of provision of accessibility services for video-on-demand (VoD) services. We have been monitoring progress of the provision of access services for VoD content since 2013 through engagement with the Authority for Television On Demand (ATVOD), platform operators and content providers. We will work with them - and use information from the April 2015 paper by Action on Hearing Loss, Sense and RNIB - to define a target that we will expect providers to reach by mid-2016. If ATVOD's 2015 annual survey of VoD services indicates that significant progress has not been made then, as we stated in the Connectivity, Content and Consumers paper (July 2013), we will consider legislation in 2016.