Why open captions in movie theatres are a good idea

10:36Why we should get used to seeing text on screen all the time

More and more of us are watching TV with captions turned on, even if it's not entirely necessary. But what is it like for those of us who need captioning to experience visual media in venues like a movie theatre?

As Alison O'Daniel, a visual artist and filmmaker on the deaf spectrum, writes in her recent guest column for Variety, it's not great.

She joins host Elamin Abdelmahmoud to explain why she thinks we should all get used to the idea of seeing text on screen, all the time.

We've included some highlights below, edited for length and clarity. For the full discussion, listen and follow the Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud podcast, on your favourite podcast player.

Alison: From my perspective, I walk into a theater [and] I ask for the assisted listening device, the CaptiView. A lot of times the people who work there don't know what it is; they have to go ask someone, figure it out. Sometimes I'm asked to give them my license—

Elamin: Oh my God.

Alison: — which makes me so offended, because I would never steal one of these things because I can't stand them. Then they give you this big device, and it's basically this object with a big arm on a bendy thing, and then something that almost looks like a visor…. It's just this big awkward thing.

WATCH | Film and Accessibility Critic Michael McNeely reviews Dolby's CaptiView

Elamin: Almost like a pager screen, kind of?

Alison: Yeah, but bigger, and it has a visor so that the light that comes from the text on the screen isn't going to bother the people around you. So I take it into the theater. I put the thing into the cup holder, and then you bend it — and it's always loud. It always squeaks. Everybody around you looks at you, and then you have to position it; hopefully you're not sitting in a seat where it's going to get in the way of the film. Then, you're constantly looking at these words and then at the screen. It gives me this headache. I can't stand the CaptiView.

Elamin: Let's talk about closed captions and the way they are currently dealt with. The idea of closed captions is pretty simple: it's to transcribe the dialog verbatim and capture the sounds that are being heard. But that's not always how it is. Can you just tell us a little bit about that?

Alison: It's rarely how it is, in fact. I mean, I've watched the evolution of captions, and one of my favorite periods of time was when YouTube captions were just sort of starting, and they were just total abstractions. They were not helpful at all, but they were amazing as kind of an art form — an unintended art form.

I've watched a lot of films where what you experience is this really distracting censorship that will happen. If there are cuss words, sometimes they'll be changed to something that makes me immediately wonder, why? What is the sort of value system that's determining this censorship?

Elamin: Like a morality at play, of sorts?

Alison: It's very strange to me.

Elamin: So there are literally movies where the character will be swearing on screen, but the captions will give an alternative to that? Is that what you're telling me?

Alison: Absolutely. And if you're a good lip reader, which I am, I'm immediately aware that this is off. On some level it's kind of funny, but actually it's really more enraging. A more common example is one that I complain about all the time is a music symbol used for music, when lyrics could absolutely be included.

Elamin: A description of a sound.

Alison: An explanation, yeah. I always feel like [with] a music symbol, what's being communicated is, "There's something here, but we're not going to give it to you," or a laziness. It's exclusion that's happening within a tool of inclusion, right? It's confusing. It's distracting. It keeps you from staying with the movie.

Elamin: For some people, I think the idea of text on screen can be a bit of a hard sell. Some people, I guess, find it distracting. Some people are married to this old idea that if you put text on a screen, it's going to be a disruption to their experience of the thing they're trying to watch. How do you think you go about winning those people over?

Alison: Just do it. Seriously, they'll get used to it in the same way that all of us who've needed it are used to going into movie theaters. I keep forgetting, because I've been making my film for so long, that films don't have open captions. I'll go to a festival, sit down and watch an English language film … and it's like, "Okay, well, you're losing me. I'm going to see foreign language films because at least I know I'm going to get the language," you know?

Alison O'Daniel will be at POP Montreal for a screening of her film The Tuba Thieves on September 30. The film is also showing at this year's Vancouver International Film Festival. The Tuba Thieves will air on PBS's Independent Lens in May 2024.

You can listen to the full discussion from today's show on CBC Listen or on our podcast, Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud, available wherever you get your podcasts.

Interview with Alison O'Daniel produced by Jean Kim.