Apology to hearing-impaired people over Dancing With The Stars captioning snafu

Monday, 25 April 2022

Dancing with the Stars came back to TV on Sunday for the first time since 2019.

Discovery has apologised to people with hearing impairments after it mistakenly promoted Sunday’s episode of Dancing With The Stars as having captions.

A Warner Bros Discovery spokesperson said in the promotion for the opening night’s live episode the hearing impaired logo was shown.

National Foundation for the Deaf chief executive Natasha Gallardo talks about how it should be compulsory for NZ to have captions on TV. (First published March 2019)

The logo implied there would be captioning on the episode, but when one Auckland man went to tune in, he found there was no captioning.

”I was ready to watch the show for the first time in over two years, I was disappointed to watch and see it wasn’t subtitled.”

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The Discovery spokesperson said they didn’t currently have the systems in place to capture the live episodes for the show, but a captioned episode would be repeated on Saturday, almost a week after the live showing.

“We are working at putting the systems in place to be able to live caption these episodes. We want our shows to be as inclusive as possible and live captioning is part of that. ”

Until the live captioning was able to put in place, the spokesperson said they were working on removing the hearing impaired logo for the scheduling of the future live episodes.

The popular reality show, which was postponed for two consecutive years, returned to New Zealand screens on April 24.

In both 2020 and 2021, the contestants had been chosen and the hosts confirmed – only for Covid-19 restrictions to force its cancellation.