PRESS ARTICLES

Lori Archer and Gary Malkowski interviewed by Beverly Thomson

Movie playing with no sound

Canada AM – Monday, July 24, 2006

Beverley: For more than three million Canadians, this is their movie going experience. About one in four adults report being deaf, deafened or hard of hearing and few movie theatres are equipped with captioning capabilities. Well, a group in Ontario wants that changed and they failed human rights complaints – or they filed human rights complaints, rather, with the movie industry. With more on the issue I’m joined by Gary Malkowski from The Canadian Hearing Society, Lori Archer from Caption Movies Now Coalition, and sign language interpreter Laura Henry. Thank you, all of you, for coming in. Gary, what is it exactly that you want to see happen here?

Gary: Well, good morning. Captioning, I think, is a benefit to everybody. I think that in terms of individuals who have English as a second language, I think that it’s important that we have 100% captioning available. It also assists children who are in the stages of learning literacy and developing their literacy skills. So, it’s really a benefit for everybody and anyone. Such as using an elevator, captioning would be quite beneficial.

Beverley: And Lori, can you explain for us what the captioning technology is that you’d like to see?

Lori: Yes, one method is Rear Window Captioning and that’s where captions are displayed at the back of the theatre and you use a reflector, like this device here...

Beverley: OK...

Lori: You angle it and it reflects the words back so that you can see the words while you’re watching the movie at the same time. The base of the reflector sits in your drink cup holder. And you just angle this a little and then you can adjust it so you can see the words and look at the movie screen while watching the movie.

Beverley: We have a portion of what Cineplex Entertainment had to say about this and the statement reads in part, “Our goal is to identify a new technology that is more reliable, more flexible and more cost effective. Cineplex is currently testing and sourcing new technologies, none of which is yet commercially available.” So, it doesn’t sound to me like they’re jumping on this bandwagon yet.

Lori: Gary, I think, wanted to address that.

Gary: In terms of Cineplex, we’ve just learned this information through the media. We have not actually learned this through the Human Rights Tribunal process. At this point, in terms of the quote that they’ve given, we would like to put them on notion to ask them to – notice – to ask them to prove their assertions at this point. The goal is that we want to have 100% captioning, whether it be closed captioning or open captioning. At this point accessibility is the priority. We want to see theatres, studios, distributors, we want to see them being part of the solution. They need to share the responsibility to ensure that we do have 100% access in terms of captioning.

Beverley: It’s an interesting technology and we’ll continue to follow the story. Gary and Lori, thank you very much. And Laura, I appreciate your time. We will be right back on Canada AM.