Just noticed that they do a signed repeat of Doctor Who on BBC2. Have they been doing that for all the recent Who series?

Also do they made the signed versions available on DVD/Bluray? If not could they add the person doing it as an additional layer on the bluray?

I'm not blind myself, just happened to notice it.

Does this make Doctor Who one of the few if not only programmes to be broadcast and repeated on BBC 1; BBC2 and BBC3?

Out of curiosity, is signed better than closed-captioning or sub-titles? I am not deaf, so I don't know, but I have no problem with subtitles (which I sooooo need for Capaldi).

Not sure how much blind people would benefit from signing...

Wasn't Adventure In Space And Time on BBC4, completing the quadrilogy of channels.
Oh and Sarah Jane on CBBC. Plus reports on BBC News channel of any momentous events.
Just BBC Parliament to go then...!

Do ANY DVD's (other than ones of specialist shows or information films created for deaf viewers) have BSL?

I've never seen any.

Of course I meant deaf not blind. My father is blind so I put that by mistake.

It appears no such things exist. Given they provide the service on TV I don't see why it shouldn't be provided for sale. Or are deaf people not considered economically worth while?

Harks to the recent newspaper reports regarding people commenting on disabled people being paid under the minimum wage.

Why is the audio commentary seldom (if ever) subtitled.

(I mean the one by various people connected with making the episode, before someone leaps to the conclusion that I mean the audio description and points out the obvious!)

Because they have subtitles. All DVDs have subtitles...

Most DVDs have subtitles.

I'll concede some don't. But the majority sold in this country undoubtedly will have.

Well many TV programmes, including Doctor Who have subtitles so why the signed version on TV?

If it's due to public service broadcasting commitments then why not release it on DVD? They gone through the effort of signing it.

May be regulations require TV companies to do things that perhaps they would rather not do but as such regulations don't exist for DVD release they can forget they ever did it for TV.

The reason it's not done for DVDs is that you'd need double the number of discs.

It's not possible to just overlay an image of someone signing onto the episodes as they are, it has to be a full encode of the episodes with the signer included over the image.

So a six DVD set would suddenly have to be twelve discs. That has serious packaging and costs implications - particularly when the vast majority of people buying the product will have to pay a premium for half the product they don't need. Not forgetting paying for the signing, encoding twice as many episodes, and authoring twice as many discs.

Even if it were possible to overlay the signer onto the picture for a DVD, there wouldn't be room on the discs for the extra image information required, so again you'd need more discs.

As to why the audio commentaries don't have subtitles, that's again down to cost - it's why a lot of budget labels don't even have subtitles on the main feature. It adds massively to the expense, even to the extent that it could make the release unviable.

DVD and Blu-ray releases of BBC programmes are different these days as I believe there's a requirement for anyone releasing them to provide subtitles. Commentaries are a whole different ball game as they're only extras.

But again, if you've commentaries on every episodes that doubles the amount of subtitling work that needs to be paid for, and it's worth bearing in mind that a lot of people really don't like commentaries. Or extras, come to that!

You'd have to start catering to a minority of the commentary-listening minority of the minority of people who actually go out and buy the product. That can be justified for a blockbuster that'll sell hundreds of thousands of copies worldwide, or even millions, but for a medium-sized TV series it could easily break the budget.

I've never understood the advantage of having signed TV shows. Why not just have subtitles and be done with it. Most deaf people can read and a subtitle is much less intrusive compared with having someone taking up half the screen signing.

As I understand it, BSL has a different grammatical structure to written/spoken English, so reading subtitles is the equivalent to many BSL users of you or I having to learn a second language, such as French or German, to be able to understand what is happening.