PinkLAM asked a good question on my earlier post, Video Clip and Picture Stills of Censored Closed Captions:
And part of me is also wondering if by putting up a fight over the way in which the captioning is set up, we're making companies think twice about using captioning at all?
What do you think?
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I think that if this is important to deaf/HOH people then it is important to continue campaigning until equality is reached. If someone gives you half of what you want, you say thanks very much, but there's still X Y Z that needs sorting out and we're going to keep pushing until you do. I've done a lot of campainging for LGBT rights, and if you settle for half measures you won't ever get full equality. It took nearly 40 years of campaiging to get the age of consent for gay and straight people in the UK made the same in 2001, and if we'd accepted it being lowered a bit but still not equal in the 90s then it would never have been equalised.
ReplyDeleteSurely it's more trouble anyway to censor the captions than not? They have to decide which words are unacceptable, then go through and edit them and decide how to do it - asterisks? dashes? first letter only? first and last letter? only take the vowels out (some UK newspapers do that)? - and then deal with people complaining about the inequality of censoring captions in uncensored programmes. Wouldn't it be much easier for them to just write what's said?
Yes, there are bigger battles to fight, but if you make it clear that you're not going to put up with the little things then the big things can be changed more easily, and there's always a big thing linked to the little thing that needs sorting.
Did you know in some community expect differently-abled adults to go to bed at 8pm? Do we want people to continue to patronize us just because we have different needs than they do?
ReplyDeleteWe still have a ways to ensure everything is captioned, yet at the same time, we don't want to be censored.
ReplyDeleteCandy~
yes...
ReplyDeletein the US, at least, the Telecommunications Act of 1996 also requires, by law, all shows be captioned and back captioned by 2008 (shows made prior to the law). That's still 90% done, but new shows, have to be captioned. I take this on some level AMC basically spitting in our faces saying, "We may not have a choice in this, but we'll censore just because you made us spend the extra grad (or so). Jerks!"
ReplyDeletetypos, sorry - eyes hurt and I didn't catch them .... opps
ReplyDeleteAre companies thinking twice about captioning? Could be. But due to telecommunications laws passed (See Scott's comments above), they really have no choice in the matter. So, we now have access. But FULL access? No. Should we ACCEPT what ReluctantMusician describes as "half measures", which are "better than nothing"? HELL, NO! (And no, I'm not going to censor that as "H---, NO!"). We are Deaf, we are adults, we have the right to be treated with dignity and have the same access to the same information and materials as Hearing people do!
ReplyDeleteI did a bit of Google-research and found out it costs about $10 a minute to CC. Using that base 45 minute, sans commercials, would be $450. So basically with my claim of AMC spitting in our faces as they 'have' pay to caption, it's based on $450 to caption a show that costs at least a million an episode to produce in it's entirety. True (_|_)'s, IMHO. Oh wait should that be "(----"? ☺☺☺☺
ReplyDeleteScott -- thanks for that info. That IS quite cheap! Your estimate might be a BIT off, since I've found that captioning takes a bit more time to do than the length of the video itself. But even so, we can reasonably estimate that captioning this (or any other hour-length show) would cost under $1000. Considering that they've already spent hundreds of thousands (if not more) in production, advertising, etc., captioning is a mere DROP in the bucket of any television (or movie) production!
ReplyDeleteI thought it was a bit cheap as well, but it was a cursory Google search. Some of the links I saw put their service at $10 a minute, but even at say 1500 for a 45 minutes, again, sans commercials, is cheap for shows that cost at LEAST s million to produce. I mean even just one minor cast member gets hundreds of thousands these day. Even one of TLC's reality shows was paying someone a million an episode. Jerky, err, Jersey Shore ☺ just reneged. to a million per person.
ReplyDeleteIf I ever buy an appliance, I'm buying Appliance Direct. They are a LOCAL chain that CC's their commercials. I give a pass to local ads that don't CC, so when one does, I try to frequent them and tell them why.