The accessibility upgrades that would probably help the most people in entertainment are the dull ones, and the industry keeps rewarding the flashy ones instead. A new adaptive controller gets a keynote slot and a week of glowing coverage. A caption track that keeps pace with the dialogue, or a festival guide a screen reader can make sense of, tends to get nothing, because nobody stages an unveiling for a file.
Rank the seven fixes below by how many people each would reach and the order runs almost exactly backwards from the applause.
Captions Belong at the Top of the List
Captions go first, and on the evidence it isn’t especially close. Around 430 million people already need rehabilitation for disabling hearing loss, a number projected to pass 700 million by 2050, or roughly one person in ten. More than a billion young adults are also listening at volumes that put their hearing at risk, which makes the crowd pressed against the barrier at this weekend’s headline set part of the projection.
The audience reaches well past hearing loss, too. Research commissioned by the captioning charity Stagetext found that 54% of UK respondents used captions or subtitles for TV or online viewing, 24% used them at live events, and 42% named concentration as a reason. On numbers like those, captions start to look a lot more like basic infrastructure than a courtesy.
What separates good captions from the box-ticking kind is mostly care. Good ones name who’s talking when the speaker is off screen and describe the sounds the story depends on, like a knock at the door, instead of every rustle. They sit on a background that stays readable over a snowfield, and they keep time. Australia’s captioning quality guidelines explain a broadcast standard built on captions being readable, accurate and comprehensible, and the regulator has observed that lag tends to get worse when several people talk at once or scenes change quickly. If you’ve watched a festival livestream captioned by a machine, you’ll know the band’s name is often the first casualty.
For producers, the practical fixes are cheap. Send the captioner a setlist and a list of artist names before the stream, because a machine has no way of guessing a band called something unpronounceable. Put a person on review for panels and interviews, where crosstalk does the most damage. The setlist is the cheapest of these and probably saves the most embarrassment. Treat automatic captions as a draft, too, since publishing one as the finished version can easily tell a deaf viewer how little effort the broadcaster thought they were worth.
The Festival Paperwork Nobody Can Read
The second upgrade is less cinematic still. Entertainment runs on paperwork, and most of it, whether that’s an access guide, a festival map or the venue statement explaining where the ramp is, tends to go online as a PDF exported from design software and built for a printer. That matters because of how screen reader users move through a document. WebAIM’s most recent survey of screen reader users found that 71.6% move through a long page by jumping between its headings first, so a file whose headings were never marked as headings leaves them with very little to hold onto.
The usual defence was that fixing those files by hand took forever, and that defence has worn thin. Apryse, the document software developer, has published a walkthrough of PDF auto-tagging that shows software working out the order a document should be read in and labelling which parts are headings and which are lists, with a person checking the result afterwards.
That final human check probably matters more than the automation does. Software is unlikely to tell a blind festivalgoer that the accessible viewing platform sits behind the second food truck. Somebody who has walked the site can, in one sentence describing the image, and without that sentence the map says very little to a screen reader user. Music has its own version of the problem, since the digital booklet bundled with a deluxe album can be little more than a scan of the printed one, turning the credits and lyrics a fan paid extra for into a stack of photographs.
A workable routine for organisers looks something like this. Publish access information as an ordinary web page first and treat the PDF as the backup. Build structure into the source file before export, run auto-tagging on anything that arrives untagged, and then have someone listen to the result with a free screen reader before it goes live. If only one step survives the budget, make it the listening test. Here the ranking wobbles a little. Captions reach more people, but a missing access guide can stop someone buying a ticket in the first place, and there’s no caption for a show you never got to.
Where Tickets and Streams Get Lost
Third comes the point of sale, the ticketing page or streaming app where plenty of people give up before anything has played. Seat maps that only respond to a mouse are common. So are checkout timers that run out while a screen reader is still reading the booking fees, and play buttons with no label at all. The same WebAIM survey ranked CAPTCHA as the single most problematic item on the web for its respondents, which should worry anyone whose checkout greets fans with a wall of distorted letters. Try buying a festival pass some time using only the Tab key and a bit of patience. It’s an instructive twenty minutes, and some sites won’t let you finish.
Few of these problems need new technology to fix. Europe stopped leaving the matter to goodwill on 28 June 2025, when the EU’s accessibility rules for products and services began to apply to online shops, e-books and the services people use to reach streamed film and television. Those obligations follow most businesses selling to European consumers, wherever they happen to be based. Australian audiences may pick up a side benefit whenever a global platform decides it would rather rebuild its checkout once than maintain two versions.
For ticketing teams, the CAPTCHA is the one to fix first, because it can block a purchase outright, so offer an alternative that doesn’t depend on reading distorted images. Countdown timers people can extend and buttons with names a screen reader can announce come next. Then run the whole purchase with the keyboard alone before each on-sale date, since a seat map that worked in March can break after a redesign in May.
Putting Interpreters in the Program and the Frame
The fourth upgrade sits where live and digital overlap. At Mona Foma in 2024, an Auslan-interpreted Shonen Knife session earned a review noting that the interpreter had as much fun as the band, which is roughly what good interpretation looks like when it becomes part of the show. The digital work is everything around that moment. Interpreted sessions need flagging in the online program and a filter on the ticketing site, weeks ahead, so Deaf fans can plan around them instead of stumbling into them.
The community relying on that information is small in national terms, which is part of why it gets overlooked. About 16,245 people told the 2021 Census they use Auslan at home, the first time Auslan was prompted as a language option, and Deaf Australia’s own census followed a year later to fill in what the national count couldn’t. Practically, promoters can hold seats with a clear sightline to the interpreter, send setlists and lyrics ahead so the interpreter can prepare, and make sure any livestream keeps the interpreter in frame, something a camera operator fixed on the guitarist can easily forget.
A brief detour on the word digital, since the title leans on it. An interpreter on a stage is about as analogue as accessibility gets, a person in dark clothes standing under a light. The internet left the interpreting itself alone and changed whether anyone could find out it was happening, and a fair amount of accessibility work in entertainment turns out to be publicity for access that already exists.
Handing the Sound Mix to the Audience
Fifth, give people control over the sound itself. Games worked this out a while ago. A widely used developer checklist recommends separate volume controls for speech, effects and music, and it names the four accessibility problems players complain about most as button remapping, text size, colour blindness and the way subtitles are presented. A lot of television still arrives as one fixed mix, which is why so many households spend a film riding the remote between murmured dialogue and deafening explosions. You shouldn’t have to.
That same checklist carries a caveat that cuts against a list like this one, though. The problems people complain about most aren’t necessarily the ones that matter most, because some of the people most affected are the least able to speak up. Ranking upgrades by reach, as this column does, probably inherits the same bias. For studios and streamers, the lesson is to keep dialogue, music and effects on separate tracks through the final mix, so a dialogue slider remains possible later instead of requiring a remix nobody will pay for.
Hardware Earns Its Sixth Place
Which brings the list to hardware, placed sixth for reasons that have little to do with its quality. Sony’s Access Controller lets players reassign each button and has four ports for plugging in their own switches and joysticks. It’s a thoughtful piece of design. It also costs money, reaches a narrower group than captions do, and depends heavily on games that allow remapping to begin with. For the players it suits, it can be the difference between playing and watching somebody else play. Big PlayStation releases had already shipped generous in-game options before the controller was even named, which suggests where much of the real work happened. Arguably, the settings menu did the heavy lifting while the controller got the photo shoot.
Telling People Before They Pay
The seventh upgrade is the smallest of the lot, and it involves telling people what’s available before they pay. The need for it shows up in national data. Of the 5.5 million Australians living with disability, 63.3% of those aged 15 and over reported barriers to social and community activities over a three-month period, and more than a third said they had avoided situations because of their disability in the previous year. A game, a streaming service or a venue that lists its accessibility features plainly on the store page spares those customers the gamble of buying first and finding out later.
Physical products have shown how far that thinking can stretch. When Microsoft designed the loop-opened packaging for its Xbox Adaptive Controller, it worked with the disability community and put loops on every layer, including the paper quick start guide, so nobody would need to tear plastic with their teeth. Someone cared enough about a paper leaflet to give it a pull tab. Whether the same care reaches the PDF manual on the support page is another matter.
Who Does the Work Next Season
Most of these seven could be done with tools that exist today. The shortage is people with time to do them, and that’s where the argument runs into trouble. Streaming platforms often move on captions when a regulator is watching, and console makers redesign a box when there’s a launch to promote. The access guide for a mid-sized regional festival, by contrast, often gets written by whoever has a free evening the week before the gates open. If it goes up as a flat file again next summer, someone using a screen reader will hear the set times in the wrong order, give up and stay home, and most won’t write in to say so. Two-thirds of the screen reader users WebAIM surveyed said they rarely or never contact a site owner about a barrier.
That silence is the part everyone else can change. If you run a venue, a festival or a streaming service, pick one item from this list before your next on-sale date and test it with someone who relies on it. If you’re in the audience and a guide, a checkout or a caption track fails you or a friend, tell the organiser in writing and with specifics. The fix is rarely expensive, but it only happens after somebody notices who was missing from the crowd.
