Rear Window Captioning at the cinema for deaf and hard of hearing – what is it like?

Just thought I would report back that I attended the Sydney Film Festival on Friday night last week to trial the new Rear Window Captioning technology, provided by Accessible Arts – I took my sister, and we saw “Cheri”.

It was a surprise – I had expected something different (thought we’d all be corralled into a little room by ourselves watching the movie through a big window!) – but it worked quite well.

I was also very surprised, (and disappointed) to find that I was the only deaf person there using the technology – everyone else was blind. (What is wrong with us deaf people? We clamour for changes, and then no one turns up to try it out when it’s offered!! gah!)

Anyway – so, we were seated way up the back, and on my chair was a small tinted panel in the shape of a long rectangle, with rounded edges, but only about a handspan in width.. And this was attached to the chair with a very squeaky adjustable arm.

This is me at the State theatre in Sydney, you can just make out the RWC in front of me, a small tinted screen.

Before the movie started, they asked us to adjust the panel to suit my line of sight – and then I realised that it literally was just reflecting the words from a small screen set up on the wall behind us!!

The screen had the captions appear backwards when you turned around to look at the screen on the back wall – it was red chunky text that is a but like the ones you see showing numbers at the Deli in the supermarket – just slightly smaller.

Couldn’t believe it… I thought it was going to really suck – but then when the lights went down, the captions became very clear, and after a few (very squeaky) adjustments, I was able to watch the movie quite well, with the captions sitting just below by line of eye-sight – so the captions didn’t appear to be on the screen of the cinema at all.

So it actually worked really well!

The only bad things were a couple of times my sister moved, and bumped my arm rest, which led to the adjustable arm being whacked out of place, and then of course required more squeaky adjustments, with us sniggering away up the back like a couple of school-girls.

Also, when people walked behind us, along the walkway, as they passed the captioning equipment, they blocked it momentarily – but this only happened very rarely – so not a big problem.

And we had to sit waaaaaaaaay up the back of the cinema – but luckily my eye-sight is pretty good, so it didn’t worry me – but might be an issue for others with sight-problems.

The best thing about it was I was watching this movie in a cinema with all these other people with normal hearing – and for once I didn’t feel like the rest of the audience was sniggering at some of the captions that appeared, or annoyed by them. So that was a big plus.

Overall, I would say this technology is pretty cool, and will change the way cinemas operate – if they decide to bring them in. And I hope they do!!