It comes during National Week of Deaf People, a week-long celebration of the achievements of the millions of Australians who live with hearing impairment.

Some initial live closed captioning has already begun, with five hours of proceedings captioned in both the Senate and the House of Representatives every sitting day since September this year.

The plan is to progressively increase this service so that it covers all chamber and parliamentary committees during 2017 – that’s approximately 3,000 hours of live captions a year.

You can check out the live captioning of parliamentary proceedings via the Australian Parliament House website.