T20 World Cup to stream and broadcast with sign language, audio description

Disney+ Hotstar introduces Hindi audio description and Indian Sign Language for visually and hearing impaired viewers during ICC Men’s T20 World Cup.

In a first for Indian sports streaming, the ICC Men’s T20 cricket World Cup will be streamed with Hindi audio description and Indian Sign Language (ISL) for visually and hearing impaired viewers, Disney+ Hotstar, the streaming service with the rights to stream the tournament this year announced on Wednesday. Reports peg the tournament’s media value between ₹1,600–2,000 crore. 

“Being the first OTT platform to introduce this feature for live cricket, we are democratizing the game … and have made this feature available for 10 matches, including India matches, semifinals and finals during the tournament,” Sajith Sivanandan, head of Disney+ Hotstar told The Hindu in response to an emailed questionnaire. 

While the ISL interpretation of commentary is new for streaming, Disney had streamed some matches of the Indian Premier League with a Hindi descriptive track in 2022. JioCinema, which owns the rights to the franchise now, does not have closed captioning, ISL interpretation or a descriptive audio track in any language. The ICC men’s ODI World Cup attracted a maximum of 5.9 crore concurrent viewers on Hotstar, a figure that is half of what pre-qualifier matches in the current season of the IPL are racking up online. 

Star Sports, which has IPL’s TV broadcast rights, announced similar accessibility features last month. “We aim to make our entertainment content accessible for the deaf, hard of hearing and visually impaired communities on VOD (video on demand) and live content over the next 12-18 months,” Mr. Sivanandan said. He added that all of Hotstar’s original programming will have closed captioning and audio description tracks — though such features for content licensed from studios remains inconsistent at best across streaming platforms. 

A review of accessibility features on streaming platforms in India by The Hindu last year found that most platforms have limited availability of same-language closed captioning or audio description for their content, with the steepest gap for films licensed from studios. 

The IT Rules, 2021 include a recommendation for streaming platforms to make their content accessible to differently abled users, but most work in this regard has been through the industry’s own practices, and the government has not visibly exerted pressure to facilitate accessibility on OTT platforms.