Stage Directions: The Institute on Disabilities at Temple University, College of Education, is collaborating with People's Light theater in Chester County, PA, and the National Theatre of Great Britain, on a project that will revolutionize arts accessibility for the deaf and hearing loss communities. Smart Caption Glasses allow people who are Deaf or experience hearing loss to view captions at any performance, from any seat in the theater, using Open Access Smart Capture technology developed by the National Theatre and Professor Andrew Lambourne.
7 comments:
This is so important! So many performing arts are very much catered and only available to abled people, and this is something that I think, unfortunately, is not thought about so much. People with disabilities should have the same amount of accessibility to theatre as abled-bodied people do. This is not impossible, as this article shows. It is so great Temple and People’s Light are putting in the effort to make this possible, and hopefully, other schools and theatres follow suit. Accessibility must not only be addressed in a socio-economic way, but also in regards to viewers who are disabled. Theatre can be an experience for non able-bodied people. I wonder how much technology like they are using costs to install and have available, and if it can be ready for the market. Hopefully this becomes a larger conversation in our community and we can move towards a more aware and inclusive industry.
This is such a no brainer in terms of innovative theatrical design I can’t believe that this isn’t getting more attention and push to be in as many theatre’s and performance venues as possible. I remember in high school our director my first two years had formally come from a school of students with disabilities and we always made it a priority to have all of our performances to as many audiences as we could accommodate. This meant we worked with interpreters and hearing aids on a constant basis I was lead to believe that it was a no brainer to make sure your performances were always accessible. That being said in all of the work I have done since then I don’t think I personally have seen or worked on a production that actively looked to accommodate as many people as possible aside from complying to AEA for seating. And that just simply shouldn’t be the case, I hope that in the near future we see more and better integration of this technology in theatre.
When we hear the term deaf, we often imagine congenitally handicapped people. However, visual and auditory difficulties could be post-lingual. Moreover, it could occur to anyone as we grow old. Considering this, Smart Caption Glasses are good for everybody. As I commented on the article “How Can Blind and Partially Sighted Audience Get a Complete Dance Experience?” last week, having constant multi-layered provision for access is highly important in order to make theatre universal. It is wonderful how the development of a new technology is involved in the physical art for the achievement. I wonder if the School of Drama and School of Computer Science of CMU collaborates in this way.
In addition, these glasses can be helpful for the audience who needs translated subtitles. I remember watching La Traviata in Italian with German subtitles in Vienna and felt like being tortured. Nowadays, shows with subtitles do exist, but they are often on the side of the stage, which forces the audience to look away from the show itself. If the caption is customizable for any situation, it will surely become an important business opportunity.
I loved reading this entire article. I think it is so important for all people regardless of any disabilities to be able to experience the magic of live theatre. I'm so glad that there are people out there who are thinking about those who live with hearing loss and that they are working to make going to the theatre a pleasant experience for them. It's simply not fair to assume that people are deaf or hard-of-hearing wouldn't enjoy live theatre simply because they wouldn't be able to hear the music or the emotion in the actor's voices. There is so much magic that comes in live theatre and smart caption glasses just make it so much easier for everyone to enjoy it. This article gives off a sense of hope for the future of inclusivity when it comes to enjoying live theatre. I believe that it is so important for anyone interested in seeing the theatre should be able to go and truly enjoy it. I love the innovation of the smart caption glasses, and I hope one day we'll see them in theatre worldwide.
The excitement and passion that Jenny Sealey, the Artistic Director of Graeae Theatre Company has for this project in the first video in this article is inspiring and really all the proof you need that this is exactly what companies need to be striving towards. Literally my only concerns with these glasses are: What has been done to make them useful to D/deaf and Hearing Loss community members that also wear glasses? Having to put glasses on top of glasses on top of glasses can often make technology like that bulky, difficult to use, or down right pointless if I can’t read the text through my own glasses. Second, is anyone making the lighting design team wear these things while they design the show? When I was in undergrad the computer science department approached the Opera Center and asked if we (a company that heavily relied on projections and media in all of our productions) would be interested in attempting holographic projections with them. We did a production of the Magic Flute with 3D holographic projections for the audience to see and everyone had to wear 3D glasses into the theater. The lighting designer finally put on the 3D glasses on opening night and went “oh no” because everything was too dark with the glasses on. This is not to say we need to fix the glasses—well except for the glasses on glasses part. But it is to say, as we implement them in more places, are we being cognizant of making sure our designers and teams are as aware of those audience members in their choices as they are of every other audience member?
I remember reading about these glasses a year ago and feeling excited but skeptical that they could reach lower-budget venues. It is exciting to read that they have made their way to Philadelphia. I would have expected to see them first in New York, so it’s a bit of a surprise. Perhaps in another five years, they could make their way to all major regional theatres. It would be particularly interesting to see if it would work as a kit that vendors could rent out. That said, it would probably be far more expensive to rent that sort of kit than to provide captioning and/or ASL translation. If the maker world could take this project on, it seems likely that they could develop an open-source system that could be affordably adopted by all levels of production. The only significant obstacle that I forsee in wide-scale adoption is buy-in; performances have existed with unused captioning technology for quite a while, so there is a cultural change needed for this technology to take off.
This is so important in terms of arts accessibility enhancements! In the past, one of the only ways for deaf or hard of hearing people to experience the theatre was to have live translators essentially act out the show or experience in a particular section of the house. Not only do these smart caption glasses save on having to train, rehearse, and pay these live translators but they also make it easier for hard of hearing individuals to focus on the show, the actors, and the design. That People’s Light is able to make them available free of charge to all needy patrons is absolutely incredible, as well. Those with disabilities often have enough in the way of extra expenses that experiencing a show in a more “normalised” fashion (for able bodied people, at least). Hopefully, these new smart caption glasses become more accessible to the general public and become adopted by other theatres. It would be wonderful for these to be available all over for people experiencing any type of hearing impairment.
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