Marlee Matlin, during an interview with ABC on the red carpet of the Academy Awards (Oscars) on Sunday night, announced that the Academy would award an Oscar for all closed captioning technology in an “Academy Award of Merit.”
A new push is underway to bring open captions to movie theaters across New York State. While subtitles or captions are common when watching movies at home, they are rarely available in public theaters, which poses a challenge for the deaf or hard-of-hearing community.
News10NBC’s Hailie Higgins spoke with advocates working to change this. A bill proposed in the state legislature would require most movie theaters to offer some showings of each film with open captions. Open captions are similar to subtitles seen at home, displaying dialogue, music, laughter, and relevant background noise on the screen.
Currently, theaters provide closed captioning devices, which have been mandatory for about 15 years. Closed captioning devices display text on a small screen that fits into cupholders, while the movie plays on the big screen. However, many people find these devices unsanitary, prone to malfunction, and inconvenient, distracting from the movie-going experience.
Jerry Bergman, chairman of the Hearing Loss Association of New York State, emphasized the importance of equal access.
“The spirit of the Americans with Disabilities Act is that people with disabilities are entitled to as near equal an experience as able-bodied people, and we’re not treated fairly right now by the movie theaters,” Bergman said.
This is the moment a deaf girl tried on a pair of high-tech, $1,500 glasses, which allow her to “see” conversations in real time.
Kendyl Pool was born profoundly deaf due to malformations in her inner ears and has used American Sign Language (ASL) to communicate since she was six months old.
Her mother Bri first discovered these ‘caption glasses’ on TikTok and knew they could be life-changing for her daughter. The glasses transcribe speech into words in real time and display them on the lenses.
She gave the glasses to Kendyl as a surprise gift on her birthday.
“Kendyl had no idea these even existed so when she put them on and I started talking, she was completely shocked,” said Bri. “She was just blown away, she even cried a little bit because she couldn’t believe she could see what I was saying right in front of her.”
The caption glasses developed by HearView connect via Bluetooth to an app that uses voice recognition technology to transcribe spoken words onto a tiny screen embedded inside the lenses. Not only do they allow Kendyl to follow conversations more easily, but they also help her practice speaking by testing whether her own words appear correctly on the screen.
“She can’t hear herself speak so she uses the glasses to check if she’s pronouncing words right,” said Bri. “She’ll say ‘Mom, Mom, Mom’ and wait to see if it pops up. When it does, she gets so excited.”
Caption Companion is an 8-inch tablet-style device that offers, free, unlimited, fast, and accurate real-time AI captioning
No account. No sign-up. No subscription. Not even an internet connection is required. Captioning can also appear on existing devices or screens.
Caption Companion comes uniquely paired with a SmartMic for unprecedented accuracy and versatility.
Need to connect remotely to a human captioner instead? Yep, this thing can do that too.
Caption Companion is the first (and so far the only) ASR product to pass the NCSP, a live captioning accuracy certification exam that only human captioners had thus far been able to pass. It’s a much more rigorous test than what you typically see for automatic speech recognition accuracy as it takes into account not only word-for-word accuracy but also capitalization, punctuation, and meaning. Here is the product’s profile on the Global Alliance’s directory: https://speechtotextcaptioning.org/Sys/PublicProfile/76483857/5593669“
Captioned Telephone Service (CTS) is a service that allows people with hearing loss to make and receive phone calls by displaying captions of what the other person is saying in real time. CTS uses a special telephone with a text screen that works like a standard phone, but with the addition of captions.
Recommended Captioning App
To make calls on your mobile phone and use your own phone number, I recommend the InnoCaption app.
Captioning Phones
These are the major services available that offer captioning landline phones at no cost to individuals with hearing loss.
Hamilton CapTel
CaptionCall
CapTel
ClearCaptions
For a person with hearing loss, a room full of people talking all at once can be a nightmare scenario. Even with hearing aids, it’s often difficult to hear the one person speaking right in front of you.
Nirbhay Narang ’25 has created smart glasses to help people manage this situation. The glasses use AI to provide transcriptions of conversations in real time, which can be viewed both on the glasses and on a phone.
“I’m passionate about human-computer interaction,” said Narang, a computer science major in the College of Arts & Sciences. “I consider myself a designer rather than an engineer and have friends who have been working in the smart glasses space for some time.”
Narang’s company, AirCaps, is taking pre-orders for the lightweight glasses. The technology works by capturing a conversation, movie audio or speaker’s voice through a phone’s microphone, transcribing it immediately on the phone and sending the transcription to the glasses. His company created the software and app that make the connection seamless.
In the U.S. alone, their first market, there are about 30 million people with disabling hearing loss, Narang said, not to mention hundreds of millions of others around the world.
A cinema is hoping to become one of the first in the country to offer “smart glasses” to filmgoers with impaired hearing.
Saffron Screen in Saffron Walden, Essex, is an independent not-for-profit cinema based within the grounds of the town’s secondary school.
It has launched a “sponsor a seat” fundraiser to raise £5,000 to buy the technology and glasses.
Paul Willmott, the chair of Saffron Screen, said: “It’s a brand new system and we’ll be one of the first in the country to use it.”
“It will enable people who are hard of hearing to see subtitles on a pair of glasses that they wear and means they’ll be able to come and watch almost any film and get subtitles,” he said.
The glasses are designed to be worn over normal spectacles, and alongside hearing aids and cochlear implant processors.
The captions appear on the lens of the glasses, making it possible to watch films and read captions without having to look away from the screen and miss out on any of the action.
List compiled by Tina Childress, Au.D., CCC-A.
This is very comprehensive! Thank you, Tina!