On this page the following entries were made in the “Deafness” category.
Archive for “Deafness”
Captioned thematics: How captions make interpretative patterns visible
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Some things you were never meant to hear
Consider the much-discussed whisper that occurs at the end of Lost in Translation, Sofia Coppola’s critically acclaimed and prized 2003 film about two Americans who develop a friendship during lonely stays at a Tokyo hotel. In the final scene, Bob [Bill Murray] whispers something to Charlotte [Scarlett Johansson]. A handful of resourceful fans, not content to let the whisper remain a mystery, have used “special sound equipment [...] to make the conversation audible” (IMDB). Unfortunately, no attempt at sound editing has resolved the question of what was actually said. [...]
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Video: XXX Captioning
Closed captions, when done well, provide access to dialogue and other important sounds for those who need them, such as deaf and hard of hearing viewers. But captions have the potential to do much more — and to do so for a wide range of viewers. I’m interested in documenting the ways, big and small, that captions can make visible those layers of meaning that may not be readily available on the uncaptioned surface of things.
Here’s a very simple example from an episode of Arrested Development, entitled “Motherboy XXX” [...]
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Video: Captioning from beginning to end
Videos need to be closed captioned from the moment the first movie logo appears on the screen, particularly in cases where theme music or other important sounds are playing over the logos of movie studios such as Warner Bros Pictures. Moreover, captions often need to do more than simply indicate that “[music plays]” or “[phone rings].” When background music, environmental sounds, or even ring tones are connected in some way to the content of the film, those sounds need to be, whenever possible, identified by name — even when they are playing over logos. Captions should start, if needed, as soon as the movie studio’s logo appears on the screen. [...]
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Video: Captioning the 2009 Masters Golf Tournament
On Saturday at the 2009 Masters, TV captions were just as likely to be placed at the top as at the bottom of the screen. When captions are placed at the bottom, so much of the action is obscured. Bottom captions make for a miserable, frustrating viewing experience. [...]
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Having a voice in Second Life
In “Virtually Accessible,” a short article published in the Spring 2009 issue of Access: The inclusive design journal, Diane Carr reports on protests that erupted in Second Life among deaf and hard-of-hearing users when in 2007 “Second Life’s developers added a feature enabling residents to speak verbally to each other using microphones.” What’s especially interesting about [...]
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Deaf American Gladiator
While browsing Hulu.com the other day, I caught a glimpse (on the site’s scrolling image bar) of what looked like a cochlear implant attached to the head of a contestant on American Gladiators. Because I have an ongoing interest in how deafness and cochlear implants are visually and discursively constructed in the media, I located [...]
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