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Apple of my eye? Not so much, really...
- 5 Sep 07, 10:00 PM
No one these days wants to wait a week for the next episode of our favourite programmes to be broadcast. Everyone wants to watch a series of 24 in, er, 24 hours. But what is the best way to do it?
has announced that iTunes, their online store, will now sell TV shows like South Park for download at £1.89 an episode. You can watch them on your computer, iPod or Apple TV.
But iTunes is notoriously inaccessible to visually impaired users, particularly the ones who aren’t using Apple computers. It is possible to jerry rig iTunes with custom scripts to make it more accessible. But you have to buy those scripts. Indeed, some people go to extraordinary lengths and expense to legally download music from iTunes. That is well and truly above and beyond, however. If sighted people were expected to go to these lengths, then iTunes would have been consigned to history a long time ago.
Apple has been rumoured to be working on the accessibility of iTunes for some time. And, to be fair, the latest update to the online store has improved its usability for people using VoiceOver, the screen reader rolled out with the Mac. But for pc users, things haven’t improved at all. The iTunes store launched in 2003 – Apple has had a long time to do something about it.
So if legitimate download websites don’t offer accessibility support to user groups, would it be any wonder if users are turning to other ways of downloading their favourite programmes? At least one bittorent website provides language subtitles for movies and TV shows. And some creative searching found some audio described material to download as well.
At the time of writing, I had a call waiting to be returned by Apple to find out if the content has any accessibility features, such as closed captioning or audio description. If you’ve heard anything, let me know, and if I hear anything, I’ll update this blog. If you are paying £1.89 an episode, then you want the full experience.
The shame is, most law-abiding people with access needs would be happy enough to buy content. It is just far more difficult to do so than it should be. For now, if you want legitimate subtitled or audio described content, then you are either stuck with waiting for the broadcast version, or waiting for the DVD – assuming they have it, of course. But that is a whole different story…
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