When Troy Kotsur was awarded Best Supporting Actor at the recent Academy Awards, he dedicated his win to the Deaf community. CODA went on to win Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay, making it a major step forward for the Academy's recognition of marginalized storytelling.
CODA, an acronym for Child Of Deaf Adults, follows the story of teenager Ruby Rossi. She dreams of being a singer, but is trapped by her Deaf family's dependence on her as their interpreter. Torn between her familial burdens and her longing to fit into hearing culture, Ruby struggles to convince her family to support her own goals.
[...] What makes CODA groundbreaking as a film for deaf people is not the narrative itself, but the accessibility. CODA is one of the first major features where the captions are "burned in" or hard-coded on every screen.
[...] Recently there have been more calls for open-captioned cinema sessions, where subtitles appear at the bottom of the big screen, but these are still few and far between. Hearing audiences are growing more accustomed to reading captions: as Bong Joon-Ho said of his own Best Picture winner Parasite: "Once you overcome the one-inch-tall barrier of subtitles, you will be introduced to so many more amazing films."
Captions are perfectly normal outside the English-speaking world, where most cinemas will show Hollywood movies with captions. The booming popularity of streaming services has normalized captions on our TV screens, especially as we gain easy access to more international productions. Even the quality of transcription and translation has fallen under scrutiny, as we saw with the different caption track options in Squid Game.
No matter how well Deaf people are represented on the screen, a lack of captioning creates an unequal language barrier for deaf viewers. Until the films and shows themselves are accessible, storytelling continues to favor and center hearing people's experience.
(Score: 0, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 14 2022, @11:08AM (5 children)
Unfortunately SJWs will move on to the next shiny thing and forget all about the deaf, just like they've done with American Indians.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Thursday April 14 2022, @01:50PM (4 children)
American Indians have never really gotten their turn. There was a moment a half dozen years ago when there were protests on a reservation in the Dakotas against a pipeline, but the media and everyone else carried that as a pro-environment story rather than a pro-Indian story.
There are many Leftists here in New York. Every time in the past three years when they have launched long soliloquies about Black Lives Matter and reparations I have said, "well, what about reparations for the Indians? What about their lives, do they matter?" They have blinked with non-comprehension. For them Indians don't even register. They have no idea that they are surrounded by displaced tribes. Mention the Haudenosaunee and they say, "Haudeno-what-ee?"
Indians suffered orders of magnitude more than blacks. They should be the main subject of conversations about racial equality and equity and justice, but they're not. Why is that?
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 14 2022, @04:24PM (3 children)
It's because the bleeding hearts "saved" the blacks. They feel they singlehandedly freed them from slavery. Secondly, they freed them a second time in the South with the whole civil rights thing. Hence, their ongoing obsession with blacks. Nobody ever "saved" the Indians. No white, SJW source of self-affirming pride in that.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 14 2022, @04:33PM (2 children)
(Replying to self)
Another thing is that, outside of a handful of places, there aren't many American Indians. Maybe none at all. There are in contrast A LOT of black people, esp. in the cities where the Leftists live. Once you get demographically replaced (or severely diminished), you are as good as gone unless you can pull a showbiz stunt to draw attention to yourself. I don't see the Indians doing much of that. I **do** see narcissistic, drama queen homos and trannys doing that (such crazy costumes!), so they get attention despite their minuscule numbers.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 14 2022, @04:56PM (1 child)
I mean, people are trying to keep them from being disenfranchised, but the Right moves so fast to fuck over everyone that it is hard to keep pace:
https://www.aclu.org/blog/voting-rights/supreme-court-enables-mass-disenfranchisement-north-dakotas-native-americans [aclu.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 14 2022, @06:23PM
If you think it's impossible for Indians to get ID, how do you think they drive cars? Or are they supposedly to stupid to get IDs, so as "disenfranchised" people, they must ride horses everywhere like 150 years ago? Please!
(Score: 0, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 14 2022, @11:56AM
In the same vein, lets force all movie theaters to have someone describe in a loud voice what's happening on-screen, for all the blind moviegoers.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 14 2022, @12:39PM (3 children)
How are you going to account for all the languages?
So when someone watches the movie but needs a translation, they are going to be watching two subtitle overlays?
What next. burn a box in the corner with a sign language avatar?
Not to mention how advertisers will creep in someway.
Maybe asking soda companies to take on the burden of recycling would be easier.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Thursday April 14 2022, @01:58PM (1 child)
That's been de rigeur in East Asia for the longest time. Any Chinese Kung Fu movie has subtitles in Chinese, because while Chinese all speak different, mutually incomprehensible dialects, they all read the same characters. But show that film in Saigon and suddenly you have Vietnamese overlayed on the Chinese, or along the top of the screen, or to one side.
It mostly comes down to what you're used to.
I suspect that if real-time switching between languages becomes a thing, it won't be long before they have differently acted and written scenes to accommodate different world views. Else, they are cutting themselves off from at least half a potential audience if they do otherwise.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 14 2022, @03:52PM
That works fine if there's one or two languages, but some programs have been subtitled in a dozen, or more languages. If you start burning in all the possible subtitles, you quickly run out of space for the video ori with subtitles so small that nobody can read them. The correct solution is what's currently the case where they're optional and can be enabled or disabled when present for whatever languages are covered.
Looking at some of the shows on Netflix, there are so many subtitle options that I have to scroll through just to see them all.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 14 2022, @04:15PM
-1 for not using the Subject line "DO NOT WANT" when the topic of hardsubs in involved.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by EJ on Thursday April 14 2022, @01:14PM (4 children)
There needs to be a better way. I know Google Glass was ridiculed, but the concept of a small HUD for special use cases could be a good idea.
My 3D projector uses active 3D glasses that detect an IR signal to sync their shutters. It should be relatively simple to add a similar tech to theaters that flashes out invisible IR data to be read by a device to show the captions on your personal glasses HUD.
What we need is for the tech industry to give this issue serious consideration. The way voice recognition tech has progressed, there should be a way to have real-time captions in public conversations.
On the other side of things, I hope to one day have some tech like "See For Me" for blind people that doesn't require another human to help.
(Score: 5, Informative) by EvilSS on Thursday April 14 2022, @01:43PM
That is already a thing:
https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2013/05/12/183218751/new-closed-captioning-glasses-help-deaf-go-out-to-the-movies [npr.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 14 2022, @01:53PM
This.
The tech is already developed. Captioning via QR Code would be fairly trivial, and, holding a phone up to the screen, an app could render the captions into the preferred language of the audience member in near real-time. A VR headset would make this more convenient.
Or maybe it's time we required that all films be presented in Esperanto, and force everyone to learn it.
Of course every story is more moving in its original Klingon.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Thursday April 14 2022, @02:04PM (1 child)
Ridiculed by some perhaps, but I would have liked a pair. They were never made widely available. A pair of those plus the dev kit would have been fun to develop applications for.
I have been a fan of wearable computing since Web 1.0. I recently switched from a smartphone to a smart watch as my communications and app platform because I like having my hands free. The watch is great for so many use cases, but it can't achieve the suitable display that glasses could.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 14 2022, @03:55PM
You can blame that on Google. The inclusion of a camera without any clear way of preventing them from being used to illegal capture pictures pretty much doomed it. It's a shame, because it could have been helpful for those of us with sensory integration issues to see things that we're blind to.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 14 2022, @01:36PM (1 child)
That fad came and went too.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Freeman on Thursday April 14 2022, @01:42PM
Come to find out, building "accessible" webpages means they can't constantly bombard them with advertisements. And that was the end of that.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Thursday April 14 2022, @02:11PM (2 children)
I'm not deaf, but I already watch everything with subtitles turned on for several reasons. Sound-mixing seems to have declined as a practice in film and TV. Dialogue is now commonly washed out in background explosions, revving motors, etc. Audiences also don't sit quietly and watch anymore. They're talking over the film, or playing music on their phones, or doing any number of things in the room while you're trying to watch. Without captions, you get lost amid all those auditory distractions.
If I'm not mistaken, though, adding captions to everything has been an option for more than a decade. Even if you still watch Cable you can hit that "CC" button on your remote and it will show the captions. Twenty years ago when you went to Crunch to use an elliptical machine all the TVs would be running TV programs with captions on, because with all the exercise around the environment was too loud to hear the dialogue.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 14 2022, @03:37PM
Why do you go to the movies? (Or do you still?)
Just wait for the movie to become available on-demand and watch it from home with captions at far less cost and without the fellow moviegoers or the deafening soundtrack.
I went to the movies 1) around Christmas and 2) a month ago, after not going for years. The first time was so that Grandma could go with the grandkids, and the second time was because we had no better idea of what to do for spousal date night. In both cases, the movies were so effing bad that we walked out. (Plus an altercation with a mask man-Karen in the first case.) The date night movie was so bad that we left within several minutes (Cyrano)!
With on-demand, the price is so low, it's no big financial hit to ditch the movie if it's crap. At this point in my life, I do not hesitate to bail on a crap movie. Life's too short. Do something else that's enjoyable.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 14 2022, @03:55PM
cinemas are mostly too loud. and i mean the stuff from the movie not the audience.
i also always watch with text. still angry that yify removed included subtitles and made it an optional download considering their audio encoding sucks donkey balls.
also netflix sucks. they have lots and lots of subtitles available but the subtitles rarely match especially for anime. they sound this but it's not 1-to-1 to subtitles. it needs double the attention to parse what is said and what is printed ..tho same ~about in meaning but still...
if they englishify japanese anime (which seems to suggest that there doesn't exist english speakers with same cute squeaky voice as in japanese) then also give us the english script as subtitles not the english subtitles from japanese spoken translation ... sheesh. (or make the english subtitles for original japanese spoken then non-squeaky english spoken script).
script: the stuff english speakers read from aloud.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 14 2022, @04:24PM
> Captions are perfectly normal outside the English-speaking world
..perfectly normal outside of mainstream cattleyard cinema chains.
Dendy (an Australian arthouse cinema) has a Jacques Tati festival up soon...
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 14 2022, @04:40PM (4 children)
I've noticed this tendency towards segregation before among the deaf, and never really understood it. "Hearing Culture"? Really?
There was a story a few years ago about some deaf folk advocating -against- the use of cochlear implants, because it would "kill deaf culture". Again, really? -Really-? Priorities need to be re-examined.
Posting anon because this is clearly going to be an unpopular opinion in today's brave new world, but if you're deaf (or blind, or missing an arm), you incomplete. I'd go so far as to say broken.
While there does not exist a reference implementation for a human being, there are ~6 BILLION of them on this planet. If 99.999% of them have two working hears and are capable of hearing within the same general range of frequencies, then by deduction, being deaf is broken. Lets make it better. We have the technology, and it gets better every year. Eventually there will be no cause-of-deafness that isn't fixable.
What else has to break inside the human brain, for someone to decide living deaf is not only preferable, but to actively campaign to stop someone else from fixing themselves?
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 14 2022, @05:14PM
People cannot stand believing that's there's anything wrong or "lesser" about them compared to others. They are perfect; it's everyone ELSE who has a problem! You find this cope with so many autistic people, homosexuals, transsexuals, fat people now, etc. It's just a "cope", as the kids say nowadays. It's also a lack of maturity that fails to recognize nobody is perfect, we all have limitations, etc. I imagine as I get older, I will eventually lose some hearing, but you're not going to catch me yelling, "Why does everybody mumble and nobody speaks clearly??" I will know it's my problem.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 14 2022, @05:18PM
To answer your question, the resistance to getting treated for hearing problems will end if the treatment can be given before the patient is old enough to have lived a long life of isolation and embitterment as a deaf person. This also assumes parents of the patient haven't lived a life as such people either.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 15 2022, @11:21AM (1 child)
Yes, it really is a different culture. A small one, and one you are obviously not involved in, but a culture all the same. It doesn't really matter if it's "better" or "worse," although cultures should not be described that way unless there is a clear moral flaw, which is not the case here.
Sign language is a distinct language used by a specific community of people, who have shared interests and experience. That gives the basis of a culture right there. What about "nerd culture" or "hacker culture?" That's closer to "generic American" experience than being deaf is, but you probably wouldn't scoff at that.
Neither does a culture have to arise from something that you personally like. Lots of people disapprove of homosexuality, but gay culture is real and has contributed to the overall cultural heritage of humanity. Slavery was a crime against humanity, but African-American culture came out of it, and that's valuable too.
The only difference is that while anybody can turn on a rap radio station or watch Ready Player One or Rocky Horror, there hasn't yet been a breakthrough mainstream pop culture thing coming from the deaf community (aside from the music of Beethoven, I suppose - but while he became deaf, he wasn't born that way, so his understanding of music was still that of a hearing person and he composed much of his music while he could still hear).
It's true that some deaf people are excessively defensive about the community and there's even some infighting about things like cochlear implants. This is needlessly destructive and goes to show that no community is immune from gatekeepers and litmus testers. But that doesn't take away from the validity of the culture.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 15 2022, @02:30PM
You make valid points, but if deafness were curable, it would be a no-brainer to cure everyone and get rid of a "culture" defined by a disability forever. Likewise, getting rid of ghetto "culture" would be a boon to everyone. Some "cultures" are more hindrance than help even to the people in them.
(Score: 2) by seeprime on Friday April 15 2022, @03:17PM
Hulu, on our Roku Ultimate, has the captioning go out of sync on about 25% of shows. It is really annoying when the words are presented a couple of seconds before a person actually says them. How about paying attention to details on the captioning that is already in use, so that it works as intended. That would be appreciated.