Captioning and Video Accessibility
The issue
Video programming -- whether it is television programming, movies, videotapes/DVDs, webcasts, or other technology -- is not fully accessible to Deaf people.
CAD's position
Quality captioning (open or closed) or Sign language interpreting should be mandatory for all programming and is achievable immediately. There are no excuses!
Captions are superimposed titles which print out the dialogue and sound effects of video programming. They are almost always closed (not visible on the screen without the assistance of a decoder machine or chip) rather than open (visible on the screen to all viewers).
The technology to provide efficient and economic captioning of all programming exists now, and it is discriminatory and in violation of equality laws to not provide it.
Alleged financial barriers to full captioning are “paper tigers”. The costs of captioning are a minuscule portion of overall production costs. Treating the costs of captioning as a “frill” to be undertaken only if there is money left over after production is irresponsible and inappropriate.
The Canadian Association of the Deaf has long maintained that captioning is not merely “a Deaf issue”. The potential captioning audience is not limited to the 310,000 Deaf people in this country. There are 2.8 million hard of hearing Canadians who may also benefit from captioning. Captioning has been proven to improve the reading and writing of people who have low literacy skills: there are 6.5 million functionally illiterate Canadians. Children learn language through the kind of exposure provided by captions. Immigrants who know neither English nor French can utilize captioning to assist them in learning one or the other language. Anyone who knows one of Canada's official languages and wishes to learn or improve skills in the other language can use captioning to this end.
Thus, a conservative estimate would be that over 10 million Canadians — more than one-third of the total population — can benefit from captioning.
The Canadian Association of the Deaf considers it unacceptable that after more than 25 years of captioning in Canada, the broadcasters of this country have still not attained the objective of fully captioned programming, and that the regulatory agencies and governments have consistently tolerated their failure.
The same principles apply to videotapes and DVDs C there is no justification for a failure to caption all videotapes and DVDs. Many DVDs offer subtitles in English and/or French; while very helpful and usually greatly superior to captioning in terms of quality, they are not a substitute for good captioning, because subtitles make only dialogue available. Captions, on the other hand, provide viewers with a more complete version of the audio track because they include sound effects, off-screen noises, musical cues, and so on. It is also very exasperating to find the movie or television episode captioned on the DVD version, but not the extra materials such as commentary, blooper reels, out-takes, “making of” documentaries, etc. It can happen that of six hours of material on a DVD, only the 90-minute film itself is captioned.
The quality of captioning remains a concern. The use of real-time captioning has led to an increase in poor quality captioning. The Canadian Association of the Deaf has participated in meetings with the Canadian Association of Broadcasters towards the development of national standards for captioning, as part of an effort to address this problem. Our position is that captions must be verbatim, rather than summaries or edits of actual spoken dialogue. Captioners have no right to change spoken words in order to make their own jobs easier; this is a form of both discrimination and censorship.
French-language captioning has always lagged behind English-language captioning in its development, due to the alleged difficulties in processing accents. The technology for expert French captioning has now caught up to English captioning; again, there is no longer any excuse not to provide French captioning for all programming on French-language channels.
If programming is provided without captioning, there should
be a discount or reduction in fees for captioning consumers. It is unjust
to charge us the same prices as hearing viewers if we are getting significantly
less accessible programming.
APPROVED: 26 MAY 2007
FOR FURTHER
INFORMATION CONTACT:
The Canadian Association of the Deaf
203 - 251 Bank Street
K2P 1X3
(613)565-8882 TTY
(613)565-2882 Voice
(613)565-1207 Fax
www.cad.ca
