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

To ask the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, with reference to the conclusions of his Department's report, Connectivity, Content and Consumers, published in July 2013, what progress has been made in establishing and enforcing targets on subtitled and audio-description TV services for on-demand content on the 80 per cent of on-demand providers in the UK who offer no subtitles at all.

The Government remains committed to seeing an improvement in the provision of access 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. Government will use information from a variety of sources to develop a target that we would expect to see reached by mid-2016. That information includes the Action on Hearing Loss, Sense and RNIB paper (April 2015). If ATVOD's 2015 annual survey of VoD services indicates that significant progress has not been made then, as stated in the Connectivity, Content and Consumers Paper (July 2013), we will consider legislation in 2016.