Captioning

On January 13, 2010, in a San Francisco court room, a judge told a movie theater chain "why don't you start doing the right thing instead of being jerks" during oral arguments in an appeal to the 9th federal circuit. The case, Arizona vs. Harkins Amusement Enterprises, is about captioning and audio description of movies in theaters.

It's January 5, 2010 and despite many emails, letters and complaints to Netflix, it appears there is still lack of captioning on many of their video products. For example, the "Instant Viewing" selections (except for foreign language movies!) and many DVDs lack captioning. COAT affiliate NAD called out to Netflix about this in 2009 but lack of captioning persists and some in the deaf community are calling for a boycott of the company.

December 21, 2009: COAT is pleased to learn that Hulu, an online provider of on-demand TV and video programming, has released a search facility allowing viewers to search for words contained within captioning text. The feature, called Captions Search, lets users locate a particular segment of a show, since captioning provides almost a transcript of a program or show. This feature demonstrates how a form of accessibility for people with disabilities can be used by mainstream users as well.

COAT's International Friend, Media Access of Australia, reports, in October 2009, that the government has released a new report on "Access to Electronic Media for the Hearing and Vision Impaired; Approaches for Consideration--Discussion Report 2009."  With Australia transitioning to all-digital television in 2013 and other media regulatory changes occurring, it's an opportunity to review accessibility.

In an effort to move HR 3101 along, COAT leadership sent letters to many industry trade associations in September and October 2009 asking if they had any further concerns or issues with HR 3101. While many groups, and individual companies, have responded, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) still has yet to respond. The last meeting COAT had with MPAA was in December 2008. Copy of COAT's letter October 19, 2009 is attached.

On Thursday, November 19, many COAT affiliates -- AAPD, ACB, CSD, HLAA, NAD, NCI, NCIL, NVRC, TDI -- attended the exciting launch of Google's YouTube automated captioning system.

Two quick polls were conducted the fall of 2009 on LinkedIn, a popular business-oriented social networking site that allows members to devise polls.Two questions were asked in separate polls. One was "Do you know how to turn on Closed Captioning on your TV?" and the other was "Do you know how to turn on Video Description on your TV?"  The intent was to see if this well-educated and generally technologically-sophisticated group would know about these disability accessibility modes on television.

Thanks to the inventiveness of COAT affiliate WGBH Media Access Group, free-lance journalist Lisa Goldstein, who is deaf, enjoys using the Rear Window Captioning (RWC) system at her local Pittsburgh AMC movie theater.  Her November 14, 2009 editorial in Pittsburgh Post-Gazette says it all.