Most of us are able to enjoy going to the cinema without too much hassle. Sure there are the queues, and the expensive snack bar (or maybe you bring your own), but for some Australians going to the movies is incredibly difficult, if not impossible to enjoy. Australians who are deaf are speaking out about the terrible captioning service in Australia, reports Jason Om from the ABC. This story was reported on the ABC website and Lateline on the 2nd of June, 2015:
“For people who rely on the visual world, it is hard to even enjoy a movie because captioning is not available for all films.
Open captioning, which displays words on the big screen, is limited mainly to large group bookings.” [1]
There are services provided by cinemas for those not attending a large group booking. A system introduced in 2010 called Captiview provides captioning for some films. The Captiview device is a small screen that slots into the drink holder of the cinema seat. Though accessible, does it really increase accessibility to films? Users are critical:
“The introduction of CaptiView was designed to increase accessibility for deaf people, but the chief executive of Deaf Australia, Kyle Miers, said most deaf Australians did not like the device… Some deaf viewers said they had suffered eye strain and headaches from having to look up and down between the device and the screen.” [1]
Other users also report that staff at the cinemas were not properly trained to use the devices and that there were limited numbers of devices per cinema. Village later confirmed to the ABC that there were 5 devices per cinema [1].
The device has been nicknamed Craptiview and users would prefer to pirate films with subtitles rather than paying for films at the cinema. Deaf movie-goers are often left disappointed before they even get to the cinema:
“When I see a movie in the newspaper I think, ‘oh that’s exciting, I want to see that’, then I see there are no captions. It’s so disappointing,” [1]
