I apologize if this entry feels disjointed and jumps around a bit. I had finished it and upon editing changed 80% of it. This entry is also rather lengthy. It covers closed captioning and why it’s important to the Deaf/HoH community, because this seemingly trivial insignificant thing is a lot more important and impacts a lot more of our lives than people realize…this just took on a life of it’s own. I don’t apologize for that. I sincerely hope that you will stick it through to the end because this really is that important.
Halloween is upon is! Costumes, scary movies, and ghost stories; I love Halloween, I always have. Halloween and Christmas; I love decorating the house and throwing parties and giving gifts. No idea what my costume will be yet but I am having a party/fire. I’m a little more mobile now than I have been in months and this party is entirely last minute, thrown in my grandparents old house that has been sitting vacant for a long while. It’s going to be a lot of work to get ready for it last minute like this, but I’m excited.
I’m telling you this because even though I’m going to be crazy busy cleaning and getting things together, I was also excited for a moment that there is going to be a Halloween Encore of National Theatre Live Frankenstine showing at a few local movie spots. It’s a play from a few years ago in London that stars Benedict Cumberbatch and Johnny Lee Miller; it’s supposed to be absolutely amazing! Unfortunately I have never seen it because it has never been released on DVD. I actually almost bought tickets online for tonight. Almost. Two months ago I broke my foot which forced me to go on unpaid medical leave and I’ve only been back on recently part-time. Money’s tight. When it came time to finalize the purchase I hesitated, then closed the window. Out of the twenty some-odd theaters in the area, only one has any form of closed captioning and they only have the rear window on one screen. They are not one of the theaters showing Frankenstine. As badly as I want to see it, and as amazing as I’ve heard it is, with out captions there’s really just no point.
I know that a lot of people think closed captioning is a little annoying and that’s why theatres do not turn it on. It is already there embedded into the film, they just need to turn it on. Like 8,000,000 other people in the United States alone, I cannot understand speech on film or television without it*. I have not been able to follow along without it since I was 17.
My hearing-loss is sensory-neural and genetic; my auditory nerve is degenerating. How my hearing-loss came about shouldn’t matter, but when I’ve had this conversation in the past people have made snide comments about how maybe if I had turned the music down and avoided concerts this wouldn’t be a problem. That I brought this on myself and shouldn’t ‘burden’ other people with the consequences.
Thing is, I’ve only been to two concerts in my life. I didn’t listen to loud music until I could no longer hear it at a “reasonable” level. My loss has absolutely nothing to do with any lifestyle choices.
It matters a lot to us that the hearing community still seems to think that there’s nothing wrong with not displaying the captions on films. That it’s okay to discriminate and exclude 8,000,000 people. For a very long time I thought that it was just because it’s slightly inconvenient and reading is “annoying,” now I think it’s because people think that there is always some other form of accessibility in place…there’s not. Legally, they have to provide a reasonable accommodation to the Deaf/Hoh community. They usually don’t. When you visit a theatre website looking at movie times, next to or right under the title of the film or next to the theatre logo there will be a CC mark indicating that they provide some form of captioning for the film; these marks appear all over the place even when the theatre has no working captioning system.
For those of you who have never had to use captions in the theatre, the most common means of captioning are rear window and Sony glasses. Rear window is a piece of black opaque plastic on an adjustable stand that fits in your cup holder, on the back wall underneath the projector they put a scroll bar that lights up with red lights–similar to the ones you used to see promoting store sales–the words are then reflected on the black plastic and you can read the captions.
Sony glasses…I’ve never actually seen in real life. I’ve been told that they are electronic and look like chemistry lab goggles, I’ve also been told that places that have them will usually forget to charge them so they either die during a movie or don’t turn on at all. Again, none of the theaters here who say that they have Sony Glasses actually have them. Trust me, I’ve asked. I’ve given theatres the benefit of the doubt and asked to talk to managers, and then have had to describe what I was talking about because they had never heard of either system.
Apart from Harry Potter I haven’t been to see a movie in years. Harry Potter was different because it’s Harry Potter. I had read all the books at-least twice, I knew how the story line went and that there was no way that they were going to deviate from that, so they were safe. I didn’t need to understand what was being said because I already knew what was going to happen next. They were much better on DVD when I could follow along, but I could deal with it in the theatre. Two of my favorite films I actually saw in theatres for the first time on a date, both of which I hated. I thought they were boring and dumb, they were both reliant on verbal joisting and quick puns which just sounded like a bunch of mumbling to me; when I saw them with captions I understood why everyone had been laughing their asses off and promptly went out and bought both films. V for Vendetta I actually have on both DVD and Blu Ray.
The I have only had one theatre ever actually have some form of accommodation. It was rear window on one screen. There was no way to know ahead of time what would be playing on that screen. To this day the only movie that I have ever managed to see in the theatre with captions is Iron Man. I cried afterwords because it was so amazing.
Captioning on TV is much better but still could be much better, especially news broadcasts. When captions are done live they will always have a 10-15 second lag, so no matter how good the captions are they will usually have to do with the story and images shown before, not what you are looking at the moment. They also tend to miss whole bits of the information and only include what the captioner feels is important. For the most part this is highly annoying and makes watching the news almost impossible because it ends up being just a random jumble of stuff or non-sensical, I posted one of those above. There are some hilarious moments though. While running on a treadmill at the gym my friend saw a piece about back pain and how “most American’s don’t know that back pain is usually caused by huge bulging dicks.” People looked as her like she was insane because she was laughing so hard that she nearly fell off of the treadmill.
Movies and PrimeTime are almost always closed captioned. Only two DVD’s that I’ve checked out in the past six years or so haven’t been captioned.
The internet is relatively new territory. For a longtime we were entirely left out of streamed videos…now after years of fighting for the right to captioning and several court rulings against the companies who believed that the ADA (American’s with Disabilities Act) did not apply to them, there have been small steps towards equality.
There is still a lot of work to do though. After a lengthy court battle, Netflix finally settled and agreed to have all their streamed media closed captioned. The infuriating thing about Netflix, and companies like them, is that just like in theaters, the captions are already there they just have to be turned on. They didn’t even have the excuse of ‘annoying’ people because like DVDs, they could be defaulted to off, and only activated by user command; we just needed the option. Now one of the main issues in captioning access is getting news broadcasters, YouTube users, and other places that post short video clips on the internet to caption them.
About a month ago a law was passed that companies–such as ABC, NBC, HBO…–that post clips of videos to the internet that are already captioned must present the option to view the captions on-line. Most people have heard of this law and some hearing people threw a fit because they largely didn’t understand what the law actually accomplished and what was left out of it; all they knew was what the lobbyists and media outlets had told them. You probably remember reading about it under the guise of a news article with a histrionic title along the lines of “,What do we have to caption cat videos now?”–that was literally the title of the Yahoo!News article–Videos of a cat missing a jump or messing up a landing, being startled or batting cutely at a brush, these things are pretty self explanatory; we can visually see ‘swat,’ ‘smack,’ ‘thunk.’ When I click on a news clip about the sub-zero temperatures heading our way and what precautions we need to take to stay alive and not freeze to death there’s no captions? That really could be deadly.
There’s a lot more involved in the closed caption debate than I’ve covered here; but I want to get this out and get people to start thinking about it. I’ll cover the different types of captioning in a further entry. Hope you all had an awesome Halloween!
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