GAAD TAKEOVER WEEK: On Global Accessibility Awareness Day 2024, we ask: why is film and TV still inaccessible for many Deaf audiences?
By Dr Ryan Bramley and Dr Kirsty Liddiard
May 16th is Global Accessibility Awareness Day, but it also marks one week since the release of our two new research films: Animating Inclusion and Rethinking Subtitles for Deaf Audiences.
These two short films are the culmination of our Rethinking Deafness, Film and Accessibility project: two years worth of research exploring how Deaf people experience suspense in film and TV. As we wrote in our project blog with our collaborators, Beth Evans (SUBTXT Creative) and Jon Rhodes (Paper) almost two years ago:
The capital 'D' in ‘Deaf’ is used to denote people who identify as culturally and lingually Deaf and thus who use British Sign Language (BSL) as their first or preferred language. For Deaf people, deafness is more than an audiological experience, and equates to being part of Deaf community and Deaf culture.
(Bramley, Evans, Liddiard and Rhodes, 2022)
"I don’t feel like I’m equal"
In our interviews with Deaf people about their experiences of suspense in film, we were struck by how poor captioning not only affected our participants’ enjoyment of a film or TV programme, but also the hurt and disappointment that this can cause - effects that last long after the end credits. As one of our participants put it:
[Poor captions mean] I don't feel like I'm equal. I feel like I'm not an important person to society. Do you know what I mean?
- Participant 8, translated from BSL to English
Our 'Six Recommendations for Change' - which can be read both on Paper’s website and in a recent evidence submission to the Culture, Media and Sport Committee’s 'British Film and High-End Television' inquiry - emphasise the importance of working collaboratively with Deaf audiences to create high quality captions which add to the experience of a film rather than detract from it.
Towards accessibility: challenging audio-centrism
As hearing researchers, we have committed to challenging audio-centrism throughout our research - including in our research films. In our Animating Inclusion: Towards Accessibility and Inclusion in Film and TV for Deaf Audiences blog post for iHuman, we reflected on how feedback from Deaf attendees at our first Animating Inclusion film screening helped us to make our own research films more accessible for audiences:
One Deaf attendee told us after the event that not all of the English words in the subtitles were accessible to them. In response to this, rather than publicly releasing the ‘Animating Inclusion’ film immediately after the live premiere, we will now be designing a BSL-signed version of the film to be released alongside the original version. (Liddiard and Bramley, 2023)
In addition to making this BSL version of ‘Animating Inclusion’, we decided to incorporate Audio Description into 'Animating Inclusion'. This is particularly important, as the original 'Animating Inclusion' film has no sound, and therefore would be inaccessible to Blind audiences as well.
End Credits
As with any piece of participatory research, we think it is important to recognise the many people who have been central to the ‘Rethinking Deafness, Film and Accessibility’ project:
- Beth Evans, who had the original idea for conducting a piece of research into how Deaf people experience suspense in films;
- Paper, a Sheffield-based research and design studio who supported our research both financially and professionally (we would like to extend special thanks to Delivery Manager, Co-Founder and Director, Jon Rhodes in particular)
- Our two brilliant filmmakers, Josh Slack (Inertia Creative) and Ed Cartledge (Sort Of…Films), for bringing our research to life
- Our two BSL interpreters, Kathryn Pearson and Tom Pearson (from Pearson Interpreting) who not only supported our research interviews, but have also provided BSL interpretation services for the films themselves
- Our fantastic Deaf Advisory Group - Dr Tyron Woolfe, Dr Celia Hulme, and James Merry - who helped us as hearing researchers to challenge audio-centrism from the outset
- And last but certainly not least, our 8 Deaf research participants, without whom this project would not have been possible.
We don’t see this work as the end of a conversation around film and TV accessibility for Deaf audiences, but rather, the beginning of one. We would love to do more research in this area, as well as bringing our ‘Six Recommendations for Change’ to film and TV production companies - in the hope that Deaf people can finally get an audience experience that they have been denied for far too long.
Dr Ryan Bramley and Dr Kirsty Liddiard are both based at the School of Education, University of Sheffield