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The Difficulties Of Finding An Accessible Movie
Up until recently, I thought that "let's watch a movie" could be an easy-to-implement, innocent idea. It still is, if the group you suggest it to can hear, can see, climb the steps and does not have a dietary restriction. But what happens, if certain members of a group lack all of the above, and you want to make sure that all are invited, all can enjoy it, and all have a good time. Now, this requires some planning.
Last weekend with a group of people, many of whom have a disability, we watched the Ultimate Gift, which is a movie based on a book, written by Jim Stovall, who is blind. So, we were right when we thought that it can't be inaccessible.
But what does it take to organize a movie event that all can enjoy? First of all, we needed a room that was accessible to all, including those who use a wheel chair. It was easy, Good Shepherd Catholic Church has provided us with the room and equipment. After we figured out what people wanted to eat or drink, we could easily get it. But when we started to have a discussion on what to watch, we had a hard time deciding. We wanted to watch a movie which has audio description and captioning. Ok, we cheated, we allowed movies with subtitles to be voted on.
It was very difficult to find anything that fulfilled all accessibility requirements. There are many movies with subtitle, or captioning, but not too many claim to have audio description as well. And I can't say that not too many have audio description, because often times it is not indicated, even if it is available. We wanted to be sure, and not to find out at the viewing that it's missing.
I started to ask around for accessible movie listings, and several people recommended the WGBH Accessible DVDs directory. But they only have a handful of titles listed, which have captioning, video description and an audio navigation menu.
RNIB claims to have over 150 audio described movies. Assuming that we could quickly order these from the UK to the Eastern U.S., we still did not have any information if these audio described movies are accessible otherwise.
So far, I found a few hundreds of most likely fully accessible movies. This gave us a list to choose from, but the way we had to approach it is that we won't watch what most people would like, we will pick from what's available. Ok, and we made it even more difficult to specify that the selected movie should be suitable in a Christian, and child friendly environment. But let's not mix this with accessibility.
In the meantime, people who can enjoy mainstream movies can pick from over a hundred thousand titles on Netflix.
All we wanted to do is to throw an event which all people could enjoy. And we all did. But we never thought such a simple desire could take so much effort.
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I hear ya
I'm still sighted but get very frustrated when there are subtitles on the TV or in a movie that I'm watching at home. For TV, there's nothing that I can do. I don't have the option to pause, rewind live TV etc, and for movies I have to keep hitting pause, walk closer to my TV, then rewind to what I missed, pause it so that I can read it, and then go sit back down. Moving the TV closer to my couch isn't an option.
There have been many times when I've had to stop watching a movie or TV program because I can't keep up with the subtitles.
The same used to apply for the Internet when visiting certain inaccessible web sites. I'd have to just move on and miss out on that site's content and services. But after discovering Firefox 4+ years ago, that doesn't happen as often due to the amount of built in accessibility features and the available add-ons for Firefox that aid in making web pages more usable.
I'm not at all knowledgeable about audio description programs, hardware, and software, but perhaps the Internet and web technologies will or already can provide a solution to inaccessible movies and other media?
Can screen readers read subtitles in videos on the Internet?
Firefox 3.5 supports open video formats (currently OGG) and it is possible to add subtitles to open video (though probably a lot of work), but I'm wondering if there is/could be a way for screen readers to read the subtitles document (SRT) with special tags, links etc?
I'll have to research audio description programs to see how they work but subtitles could be used for descriptions and coding could probably be added to the subtitles document to alert a person that a subtitle is coming up allowing the person to pause the video to listen to the subtitle.
Far fetched?
Please feel free to share and educate me on audio description programs, how they work, and how screen readers handle subtitles online if they can at all.
No master list
There is no master list of DVDs with audio description. In the 1990s I tried various methods of maintaining such a list, but nothing worked.
Reply to Ken
Ken,
You have several questions here. Given that I have received many similar questions privately, I will address audio description, subtitles and captioning in separate blog posts in the near future. Stay tuned.
Reply to Joe
Thank you Joe, this is what I was afraid of, and unfortunately it seems this is going to be the case for a while.
DVDs with audio description
There IS a full list of DVDs with audio description here:
http://www.yourlocalcinema.com/ad.dvd.html
It's UK releases, which I believe are Region 2.
Most popular cinema/theatre releases here in the UK have audio description. Almost 50% of cinemas have audio description facilities.
The audio description is not always carried over to the DVD release. Only around 2 or 3 DVD releases a week here have an audio description track.
Derek, yourlocalcinema.com
A movie event
I hear yo too. Organizing a movie party is harder. People know what they like and what they don't like. Its hard to find something that they can agree on. You have to be diplomatic and autocratic at the same time. Ugh!
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