Axxlog

The state of New Jersey is carrying out a human-rights investigation against Regal Entertainment Group. Previously, Regal was served with a complaint, as were many other theatrical exhibitors in New Jersey, because Regal allegedly discriminated against deaf moviegoers by refusing to provide captioning. Every other movie chain caved immediately and agreed to install Rear Window® captioning, while Regal argues that Rear Window is unpopular and expensive compared to open-captioned films, which some of its theatres already show.

Interestingly, I made myself aware to all parties in that proceeding and explained that I have expertise that could be useful. Nobody took me up on my offer. Perhaps at least the state of New Jersey should have, since a recent press release contains many errors that could have been avoided by somebody with half a clue. (Interestingly, some of those errors have been copied by the Associated Press, which responded to my complaint with a defense that they were simply working from the press release.)

It seems that New Jersey has finally realized that deaf people are not the only disabled group that has trouble enjoying movies. (Lots of deaf people would tell you that only they’re the only important ones, but they would of course be wrong.) Now New Jersey is extending its complaint against Regal to include audio description. Let’s fisk the press release, shall we?

(more…)

File a lawsuit, settle, and have the losing side pay your court costs, that’s how.

This week, the proposed settlement in the case of Ball et al. vs AMC et al. was ratified by a judge. A dozen movie screens in metropolitan Washington, D.C. will be equipped with WGBH MoPix systems.

• “Movie theaters to show captions for the deaf”
• “Deaf moviegoers in D.C. win, will get theater captions”

Great, right?

Yes, in principle. But both sides paid for their stubbornness – deaf captioning viewers pressing and intervening in the case and the movie houses.

1. Kevin Ball, a deaf person, was the primary plaintiff. He pressed for Rear Window® captioning.
2. AMC and Loews, the movie chains, resisted and lost. The settlement agreement, which is not the same as a finding against these defendants in court, nonetheless requires the chains to install at least 12 MoPix systems and pay the plaintiffs’ court costs, a cool $260,000.
3. The Coalition for Movie Captioning intervened in the case, arguing, among many other points, that the correct accessibility method is open captioning. Jurisprudence on the Americans with Disabilities Act is utterly consistent: Open captioning cannot be required under the ADA. We don’t have to like it, but that’s the reality.
4. Other intervenors raised largely irrelevant or inaccurate objections.

Now, far be it from me to sound like I disapprove of the outcome. I’m in favour of more captioning and more description. I’ve put in more time watching Rear Window captioning than anybody else. (Maybe in a year or so my record will have been eclipsed. Nonetheless, 130 hours are a hell of a lot of hours.) I am uniquely aware of the strengths and weaknesses of the system. It has many strengths for the majority of viewers.

But here we go again with deaf people acting like whatever they need is the maximum everyone needs. If you’re gonna launch a class-action suit, why not broaden the class? Instead of pushing for captioning, push for accessibility. Exactly as I stated before, here we have a group of deaf persons essentially saying “Give us what we need and stop there.” Captioning is what deaf people need, and once they get that, they act like the problem’s solved.

What happened to all the blind people? Wouldn’t a class-action suit that comprised deaf/hard-of-hearing and blind/visually-impaired moviegoers have been a better idea?

All’s well that ends well, you might say. According to WGBH reports, AMC and Loews are simply installing full MoPix systems, with captioning and description both. Well, that’s grand, and we shouldn’t begrudge a desirable outcome. However, the methods stank.

Interestingly, I give reasonably good odds that, had the lawsuit been launched by blind persons, they would have included captioning in their demands. But the odds I give are only reasonably good. If they’re willing to lobby for description, but not captioning, of “a film that principally appeals to the gay Christian sadomasochistic community,” I put little past them. (Making any kind of movie accessible to some people but not others is my complaint. Some of my best friends are gay Christian sadomasochists; they certainly go to the same bars I do. Nonetheless, it’s an unusual movie to go to the wall on, don’t you think?)

Money

The theatre owners also played their cards poorly. (But in my experience, that’s what they do.) The writing was on the wall from the start. Since they’re now on hook for lawyers’ fees equal to approximately twenty additional MoPix installations, won’t it be interesting when some other deaf person or group lobbies those two chains for further accessible screens? Essentially, D.C. captioning viewers now will enjoy 12 accessible screens for the price of 32. Good job!

And while we’re discussing money, let’s look at a gem from a brief filed in the case that summarizes testimony by Larry Goldberg, Director of Media Access at WGBH Educational Foundation. (Emphasis added.)

Mr. Goldberg testified that increased implementation of RWC will provide funding for WGBH, a non-profit organization, to improve RWC and address the concerns that have been raised regarding its use…. Mr. Goldberg was clear that proceeds from the sale of RWC are devoted to the improvement of the system, meaning that the RWC to be installed under the [proposed settlement] will improve over time. Thus, the viewer screen, gooseneck, and data wall may all be improved with additional use and funds…. Mr. Goldberg’s testimony [was] that nothing will improve the technology of RWC or increase its ease of use as much as the funding provided by more installations.

Hence, one reason WGBH supported the installation of Rear Window captioning in this case was because it would financially benefit. It was certainly very interesting to read an affidavit by Goldberg that discussed the competing DTS-CSS captioning system, though the affidavit could not be considered critical or disparaging. Nonetheless, in the affidavit, WGBH testified about a competitor.

(However, in another wrinkle, every MoPix installation requires a DTS controller. DTS also sells the DTS-CSS system. Hence they’re not really competitors, and DTS would receive a dozen new sales no matter which technology had been chosen. Sweet, huh?)

Of course, the cost of a MoPix installation is largely consumed by the hardware, chiefly the DTS playback box; the LED datawall; emitter for the infrared audio description (or transmitter if using an FM system); and finally the reflectors and headsets. WGBH does not really benefit from theatres’ expenditure on that equipment. However, DTS definitely does: Its controller boxes are at the heart of the MoPix and its own DTS-CSS systems. Everyone’s gotta make a living in this business (including me); I just want everyone to be aware of who’s making the money.

The proceeds from these dozen installations will improve Rear Window captioning, we are told. But in an early affidavit in this case by Goldberg (undated in my electronic copy, but metadata show it as having been created 2003.11.13), he states that “there is a license fee of $2,000 that must be paid to WGBH as the patent holder of the technology.” We can view this statement as an estimate of the funds WGBH will directly receive from each installation.

So here’s the punchline: If all it takes to improve Rear Window captioning is a sum of money so small it’s a joke ($24,000), then why have we been made to wait? Why force two companies to pay ten times that amount in compensating the other side’s legal fees in a lawsuit? Why not increase the captioning and description service fee by a grand and wait for two dozen movies to flow through the shop?

Lessons

The writing’s on the wall, folks: You can’t run a movie chain without accessible screens. And for the entire industry, it’s cheap. Your legal costs in fighting a case will dwarf your expenditures to simply make your theatres accessible. Don’t fight a battle you’re going to lose – and for which you’ll end up paying the other side’s costs.

Throughout the entire topic of cinema accessibility, we’re always talking about trivial sums of money – rarely more than $25,000 to do anything. Even small independent films, to the extent that such exist anymore, can afford costs that small. It is extremely inexpensive to make movie theatres and movies accessible. Quit nickel-and-diming us here.

Relevant documents

Purely for convenience, I assembled and converted several documents relevant to the settling of the case. I converted the PDFs to tagged accessible format and did text-only conversions which won’t be perfect. Don’t consider any of these documents official if they come from my server; they’re for reading ease only.

Interestingly, the only documents I have are from the plaintiffs, but since this is a settlement and not an imposed ruling, I assume they adequately represent the views of the defendants. If not, defendants’ counsel can simply provide me with files and I’ll add them here.

The settlement itself

1. Official PDF
2. My PDF
3. My plain text

Affidavit by Larry Goldberg

1. Microsoft Word (edited to single-spacing and uniform font)
2. My PDF
3. My plain text

Plaintiffs’ Response to Comments (that is, response to objections filed by intervenors)

1. PDF
2. Plain text

Objections by Coalition for Movie Captioning

1. Official PDF and homepage
2. My PDF
3. My plain text

Plaintiffs’ Post-Fairness-Hearing Brief (making the case that the settlement is fair and reasonable)

1. PDF
2. Plain text

All right, I’ve sat on this for a couple of weeks and now it is finally time to call bullshit on certain deaf people and certain other blind people who appear to have rather less of a commitment to accessibility than we noncrips do.

On the MoPix notification mailing list, suddenly we started seeing notations like the following:

1. February 13–19: “We’ve been contacted by numerous movie fans and MoPix users who are blind and visually-impaired regarding the soon-to-be-released film, The Passion of the Christ, directed by Mel Brooks [Gibson, shurely?! – later fixed]. Folks want to know if this film will be described. We are working with the film’s distributor now on this issue, and further information will be provided to folks via this list as soon as we have it. Note, the film will be subtitled, and so will not have Rear Window Captions.”
2. February 20–26: “This film is currently being described in the Media Access Group’s Los Angeles office. Our current estimate is that the description for the film will be available a few days after the film debuts in theaters. We’ll pass along further information about where and when this film will play with descriptive narration as soon as we have it. Note, the film will not have closed captions, as it will be subtitled.”
3. E-mail: “I believe they have only heard about the description piece from consumers, and so that is their priority as a first-time MoPix participant. You can understand why much of the world would think that the subtitles are enough; as a matter of fact, we haven’t heard from anyone in the deaf/HoH community expressing disappointment that the film will not be captioned. ”

Shall we recap, friends?

Some Hollywood studios are such cheap bastards that they only caption and do not describe their first-run pictures. The number of these films is pushing a hundred at this point:

• 32 “large-format” pictures (mostly Imax), though do please note that Space Station and Imax NASCAR were indeed described, contrary to WGBH’s misinformation
• 60 Hollywood pictures

For Austin Powers in Goldmember, which was only MoPixed because I persuaded my generous colleague at Alliance Atlantis to pay for it, costs were estimated as follows for a two-hour runtime:

• Rear Window captioning: US$2,000 ($16.66/minute)
• DVS Theatrical narration: $12,000 ($100/minute)
• MoPix disc engineering and replication: $7,500
• Total: $21,500

The movie actually ran 94 minutes, so costs were lower, on the order of $18,500. WGBH description is six times as expensive as WGBH captioning. Nonetheless, the entire cost is trivial.

Thus began the rash of captions-only movies.

• It’s so much cheaper!
• We know about “clozecaption”; we’ve heard of that before. It’s subtitles, right? We know that.
• This DVS… I dunno. I just don’t see a lot of blind people going to a movie theatre.
• Besides, we can reuse the files. We have to caption the thing for home video anyway, so this way we can pretty much do a 2-for-1.

(They can’t actually “reuse” the files unless WGBH captions for home video, which happens from time to time, as in one version of Solaris I’ve seen.)

I accused deaf people of hypocrisy for letting this happen. I know from decades of experience that grassroots deaf people, who don’t even consider themselves disabled except when legally or politically expedient, aren’t really concerned with accessibility. They just want their needs met. If they even bother to think about it at all, here’s what they think: “Accessibility is for disabled people. I don’t need accessibility.”

Some deaf organizations understand the need for universal access. I assume there are scattered deaf individuals who understand the principles at stake. But many grassroots deaf people don’t give a damn. “Give us captioning and you’re done” is the entirety of their attitude.

Now, are blind people any better?

We have, in The Passion of the Christ, the third known theatrical showing of a picture with descriptions only, the others being My Left Foot and Stardom. Perhaps our dear British friends have given that concept a whirl, though they hardly matter, given their capacity to do so very much wrong.

I have done the usual searching (I am rather good at that, you know) and have found no evidence whatsoever that blind groups or individuals have made the following points:

1. It’s just grand you made the film accessible to us, but we’re not the only ones who need accessible films.
2. You seem to think subtitles are captions. Have you ever tried understanding a movie with subtitles and no soundtrack? (What is happening to Beatrix in Kill Bill Vol. 2 as she’s loaded onto the bed of that pickup truck? All I see is black screen.)
3. You’re aware, are you not, that subtitled films are captioned all the time? In fact, Kill Bill has both, if you’d like to have a look.

I need deaf people to publish a logically defensible argument why movies should be captioning-only. I also need blind people to write a similar argument demonstrating that movies should be descriptions-only. I would also entertain a third argument that subtitles are captions. I expect all those arguments to be easily refuted, and would elicit a great torrent of laughter here.

Next I’ll need the same arguments as articulated by service providers, particularly WGBH. I wouldn’t be chuckling at those, I’d wager.

While we’re waiting, I will point out that the only people who seem to give a shit about accessibility for both disability groups are people with no sensory disabilities. Like me.

I’m not going to stop working in a field I’ve devoted half my life to merely because some of the beneficiaries of my work are hypocrites. What I also won’t stop doing is calling them hypocrites. I’ll quit when you do: If you want me to stop calling you hypocrites, quit being hypocritical.

It’s a yes-or-no proposition: Do you support accessible cinema? Movies with captions only or descriptions only aren’t accessible. What, then, are you going to do about it?

It can now exclusively be revealed that I write scripts for audio description.

Yes! It’s true. And it’s been a publicly-available fact for over a year – if you happen to watch one of the movies I described and stick around for the credits.

So far, I’ve done a mere two, both of them large-format films: Santa vs. the Snowman and Imax NASCAR [3D]. You quite possibly may have missed Santa vs. the Snowman, but the NASCAR picture is gonna be running for a while. You won’t be able to watch the movie with descriptions in Canada, since no Canadian Imax theatre has a MoPix system. Only some of the U.S. theatres will run it, and it is impossible to find the whole list of theatres online. You’ll have to phone your local house, unfortunately.

At any rate, I wrote the scripts at the request of my friend and esteemed colleague Nancy Harvey of Nancy Harvey Productions. She’s overseen language dubbing for Imax and other productions for many years and has occasionally been responsible for captioning and description. She’s been a big booster, actually, and hired me for this purpose.

Methods

I used to think that videotape remains a tolerable source medium for any kind of accessibility treatment. But I suffered through the minor shifts in read/write heads on even the best of my four VCRs for Santa, which forced me to rewind to get just the right timecode for a description. This time I gave up and went digital. I digitized the NASCAR VHS tape using an EyeTV box and, through some jiggery-pokery, saved it as a slim, tidy 519 MB QuickTime file, which allowed me to stop and start on a dime.

I decided to live dangerously and just run the thing and describe on first viewing rather than watching it in totum first. I am not convinced that a dry-run first viewing is necessary. It’s certainly not necessary if done with sound only and no picture. The ostensible rationale is to make very clear to sighted describers exactly which moments in the production aren’t understandable from the soundtrack alone. But describers can do that while they’re watching the picture for the first time. They’d only write the descriptions when watching the movie anyway; an initial viewing for review is a waste of time.

I did a lot of reading aloud against playback to ensure the descriptions would actually fit, and took into account the fact that I talk faster than narrators. I nailed the time allotments pretty well, as it turned out.

The trickiest part by far was describing one sequence after another of cars racing around tracks. I decided to stick to basics and describe what I observed – not just cars around a track, but specific cars around specific tracks in certain weather with certain crowds, crews, and onlookers.

Keeping the example of 2 Fast [&] 2 Furious quite prominently in mind, I assumed that many viewers attending a NASCAR movie are gonna be car buffs, so whenever possible I identified make and model of vehicle, which in some cases required extensive Googling. Under better conditions, printed sources would be available. (Nancy later asked one of the producers to look a few things up for us, which he did. Fortunately, we had time for that step.) I have a small fear that I flubbed the identification of a few of the cars – if so, for the love of God tell me – but that is merely a fear; I have reasonable confidence that every car I name actually is that model. I’m a car buff myself, you see, despite being unable to drive.

A few visible details were too small to discern in VHS and certainly too small in QuickTime; we had to double-check against the Beta tape in the recording session. Beyond that, so help me, it wasn’t that hard. Watching 130 hours of cinema audio description, plus description on TV and home video for the better part of a decade, has taught me a few things. (But you’ll be able to fact-check my arse; see below.)

Interestingly, this picture, with a 46-minute runtime, took slightly less than six hours to script. That would be considered monumentally fast for one leading description provider I know (where getting through a mere ten minutes per workday is the standard) and possibly a bit slow for another (where turning around a stack of tapes in two or three days from start to finish is the standard). My work time was much faster than with Santa. Using online media helped, but I think I’m just getting better at it.

My triumphant moment: Describing a dualie pickup truck as such – because that’s what it is.

Script mechanics

I wrote the whole script in HTML. I do everything I possibly can in HTML.

I used markup as follows, which you are free to duplicate. The definition list is, by spec, the correct semantic markup for dialogue.

<dt class="T"><span class="hours">01:</span><span class="minutes">03:</span><span class="seconds">42:</span><span class="frames">06</span></dt>

<dt class="lead-in">green flag drop on race day</dt>

<dd class="DX">Shirtless guys in shorts and gals in halter tops watch the race from the roofs of their RVs.<br />

[end before women’s voices]</dd>



I should have used another dd for extros like [end before women’s voices]; I’ll do that next time.

Timecodes were a bother and are possibly a reason not to use semistructured HTML for this application. The tape I was given was 48 seconds off the final tape; I had to add that increment to every timecode. With a great deal of text massaging in BBEdt, whose steps I cannot now recall, I was able to import the text file into Excel and use Belle-Nuit’s timecode macro to add 48 seconds. (The documentation is crap. I know how to use it now and can help you out if need be.) The results were not always correct – in three or four places, our timecodes were off – but the day was saved.

Another downside is printing, with widows and orphans everywhere. Importing into Word was a possibility, but it did not read the indented stylesheets properly. We lived with the widows and orphans; perhaps next time I’ll try harder.

Nancy and I spent an hour on the phone cleaning up the script and flagging parts for fact-checking (“verificationism”).

Recording

We eventually found a narrator, after a circuitous process: Jeremy Harris, the voice of Toronto 1.

It is not an easy task. For this kind of production (essentially a guy movie about guys racing cars for guy spectators), a male narrator is preferable. Key here are clear enunciation and a voice that is mostly unbiased yet prosodically varied enough that you can understand the actual words. Further, you need vocal qualities that are not in the least bit kooky or marginal. That latter requirement immediately disqualifies half the voice talent in town, who are accustomed to “acting” in kooky, marginal radio commercials. It was very easy to listen to MP3s and eliminate candidates right off the bat. That could be a kind of selection error: If all you give us are sound samples of kooky, marginal radio commercials, that’s the only kind of work you’re going to get.

It is difficult to separate kookiness and marginality from the intrinsic qualities of a voice. I am not at all expert in this area, and indeed all I did was suggest names to Nancy, who has an ear for this sort of thing. The criteria may be hard to put into words, which is something I find frustrating, but a good ear can tell at once who works and who doesn’t. Our instincts were correct, and Jeremy gave us a good read.

We made very few corrections to the script, and only a couple of deletions.

Studio session

Now, what went on in the recording studio? Well, you’ve come to the right place: You Are There!

We recorded the description track at a Major Downtown Studio with a sound technician and an assistant who wrangled ProTools on a dual-monitor G3 running OS 9. I brought one of my laptops and a raft of printouts. We had to reboot ProTools and our producer mike didn’t work, but we had no other technical glitches. (We could still talk to Jeremy using the room mike.) Jeremy stood – the entire time, by choice – in the quintessential soundproof booth. I was amazed to learn that his distance from the microophone could be detected by Richard, our technician. Twice without looking, he told Jeremy to move back to his original spot.

Since we knew we weren’t recording a home-video mix that would require ducking and restoring the main audio, we were free to custom-craft a monophonic voice recording meant solely for listening through headphones. (There was no chance of Jeremy’s voice clashing with that of the NASCAR movie’s narrator, Kiefer Sutherland. You the description listener always hear our guy through headphones and Sutherland everywhere but headphones.)

We had the right atmosphere in the room: Time is money, but if anyone heard something amiss with a take, we spoke up. (All of us heard something at one point or another – even Jeremy.) The flaw may not actually have been there – a couple of playbacks proved those takes were fine – but if you don’t speak up, mistakes will slip through. That may nonetheless happen even in high-profile productions; I’ve heard Miles Neff croak here and there in DVS Theatrical. Still, you have to develop an environment where anyone in the room may speak.

(At the one and only DVS recording session I attended, the producer heard us muttering on the couch at the far back of the room. Right into the microphone, he muttered back “Everyone’s a describer.” Indeed we are!)

Now, how long did it take us? A long time. Really quite a long time. Longer than we’d have liked. We could have shortened the session by a small amount in retrospect, and I already have a checklist going that will streamline the process for our next such production, but in all fairness, we were working at Imax levels of sound production and we cut no corners whatsoever. The technician, assistant, and Nancy also did a post-recording mix to remove stray breaths, modulate the volume to match the original sound level, and smooth pacing in a couple of cases. To simulate the actual theatrical experience, they listened to description over (fabulously-high-quality) headphones and main audio through room speakers.

And ironically, unless I fly to Houston or something, I will likely never hear the finished product.

Photos

I told you already: You Are There!

Jeremy, plum tuckered

We’ve just finished the entire recording session. What better time to snap our narrator’s picture than when he’s pooped? My fave detail here: The folded and discarded script pages on the floor!

View from the big chair

Nancy and I sat on a platform at the rear, from which I snapped this photo. (My picture of Nancy is so hideous it’ll never see the light of day.) That’s Richard, the sound technician, at the controls; he’s wearing a Molson Indy T-shirt for the occasion. On the monitor at top left is the credit sequence, which took years off our lives.

Listings

To return to the question of listings: The NASCAR film was captioned by WGBH for the Rear Window® system, but they didn’t do the description. In cases like these, WGBH likes to pretend the movie barely even exists. You can find Imax NASCAR on their Descriptions of First Run Movies Shown with MoPix and All MoPix Films pages, both of which list the movie as captions-only. That was true until last week. Let’s see how long it takes WGBH to update the listings.

Fact-check my arse

In the grand tradition of Web publishing, I hereby invite readers to fact-check my arse. I put two years into watching DVS Theatrical productions, griping about every warble, cough, and malapropism – and laying down for prosperity all appropriate praise for the good work. I told it exactly as I saw it, good, bad, or otherwise. It would be hypocritical to expect listeners of my description track to refrain from doing the same.

I’m merely the writer, not the producer or narrator, and I’m making the following offer purely in that capacity. If you’re at all interested, see if you can figure out where the NASCAR picture is playing in your neck of the woods. Watch and listen. Jot down anything that comes to mind. (I learned the hard way that notes are essential. Just how a blind person takes notes in a movie theatre I haven’t worked out yet, but not all listeners will be blind.) Drop me a line at description at joeclark dot org. All issues will be addressed.

Or you could go all the way and post your comments online. Heck, I do!

David Pescovitz, “Wirelessly Enabling the Disabled”:

Currently, the best captioning technology offered by some movie theaters is Rear Window, a scrolling LED display

Nothing scrolls. It’s pop-on captions only.

mounted at the rear of the theater that displays mirror-images of the captions already embedded in Hollywood films.

They’re not “embedded,” and they’re certainly not embedded in all Hollywood films, as implied. Captions and descriptions reside on a separate CD-ROM that can be played by itself, or its contents can be copied to a hard drive. In either event, the player, reading timecodes that are embedded in Hollywood films (on the frame margins), and triggers caption display and description playback. There are no separate prints, and in fact you can use any print you want of a specific movie.

Hard-of-hearing audience members watch the film through transparent reflective panels mounted on the chairs.

They’re translucent. They could be transparent for reasons of optics, but they aren’t. They’re smoked plexiglas.

“It’s awkward,” Mitchell says. “Even if the text is provided on the screen itself (at the bottom), you have to constantly look at the words and you miss the picture.”

That’s disingenuous. Any offscreen captioning system would generate the same complaint, as would all captioning systems, period, if you think about it.

Anyway, since I’ve watched more movies with Rear Window captioning than anyone else, I can categorically deny that “[i]t’s awkward.” If you’re in a good seat near the display, and if the reflector is in good shape, and if the LED display hasn’t been beaten to shit, the system works extremely well. It’s not very good for neophytes, though, or anyone with presbyopia, since it becomes difficult to switch focus between the captions and the movie.

The Center’s solution is simple, yet effective. Captions already embedded in films are transmitted to a PDA,

They’re not embedded in the film.

either belonging to the patron or borrowed from the theater. A tiny monitor that clips on any pair of eyeglasses virtually suspends the caption in the wearer’s field-of-vision.

This is the same as the Virtual Vision approach that was tried and rejected. You know, two different Technology Review articles have run on this topic, one of them written by me. (The other one, which I have here in front of me, is “Wireless for the Disabled,” December 2003/January 2004 [abstract], with no byline.)

Of course, live settings require a typist to provide the captioning.

No, a stenotypist. A stenocaptioner. CART, if you want to be more precise.

As speech recognition software improves though, it’s easy to envision a PDA-based portable captioning system so hearing-impaired individuals can read their real-world conversations without breaking eye contact.

Two generations hence, possibly, yes.

In that case, though, how does the “hearing-impaired” person talk back? Isn’t this the converse of reading out phrases from a foreign-language phrasebookbook, but not understanding what the natives say to you?

By the way, until I try this system and know it works, I think the idea of staring down in your lap at a PalmPilot to read captions is a non-starter. How is this really better than Rear Window? It apparently is not. I’m sure our dear British friends will lap it up, though, as is their wont.

See also

• Wearable Captioning homepage
• CSUN presentation
• Behind the booth
• Test of Closed-Caption Systems at Langley Theater