There was a video by Fox 13 News Tampa Bay via Facebook yesterday that featured a man in a bright yellow shirt what turned out to be not a professional interpreter but someone who knew some ASL. This caused a big furor in the Deaf community.
Posts tagged as “captioning”
Since learning about TV captions in 8th grade, I cannot imagine my life without good quality captions – for movies, videos, live events. I didn’t start going to movie theaters until I was in college when I learned about movies with open captions that were displayed directly on the screen and it was a wonderful experience! Sadly, later more theaters decided to stop offering open captions and started to force deaf and hard of hearing patrons to use cumbersome closed captioned devices.
There have been many instances where captions were censored on TV or in a video even though when the audio was not. Of course, profanity is not meant to be heard by minors. However, if speech can be clearly heard word for word on TV or in a video, it also needs to be captioned word for word – including expletives. So deaf and hard of hearing adults have the right to know every word said – otherwise censored captions of speech (that is clearly heard) would be considered a form of paternalism.
