The silent film era was a cultural catalyst, ushering in the dawn of the silver screen through an innovative blend of art and technology. An essential chapter in Hollywood's history, these movies, interspersed with text, also introduced the first notion of accessible visual captioning, which would galvanize deaf actors and activists as early as the 1920s.
A hundred years later, however, it's now practically a miracle for deaf and hard of hearing viewers to find a local movie screening with on-screen ("open") captions. In fact, despite a century of innovation, it's still a central organizing point for many disability rights advocates, who hope that continued digital advancements and mainstream advocacy will bring open captions back as a standard practice.
In the 21st century, auditory and visual accessibility has gained relevance for viewers with and without disabilities, as more and more audiences report that they prefer to watch content with subtitles or captions(opens in a new tab). As social media platforms and streaming apps have picked up on the demand, some have instituted automatically generated or even customizable captions(opens in a new tab).
Still, the general captioning environment is far from perfect. In 2021, AMC Theaters made a substantial expansion to its open captioned options, offering accessible screenings at 240 locations nationwide. While it was the biggest move by such a company at the time, it was just a fraction of the mega-popular chain's 950 locations.
At the 2023 Sundance U.S. Dramatic Competition, members of the jury walked out of a screening in protest(opens in a new tab) of broken festival captions. Twitter, under the direction of Elon Musk, quietly got rid of its internal captioning service for Twitter Spaces(opens in a new tab) conversations, and many have complained about the inaccuracies of automatically-generated captions and subtitles in languages other than English.
When it comes to movie viewing, most (if not all) of these issues could be solved by the simple offering of open captions, just as our film predecessors used years ago. So why is the industry still moving at a snail's pace to universalize the option?
Intertitles, subtitles, supertitles: What's in a 'caption?'
Open captioning services are often lumped together with other accessibility options known collectively as Audio-Visual Translation (AVT) — such as closed captions and subtitles — but each offers a unique viewing experience(opens in a new tab).
The most common early captions for silent films, known as "intertitles," were inserted between scenes to provide non-visual context, explained Dr. Christian Volger, director of the Technology Access Program(opens in a new tab) at Gallaudet University. Intertitles were created in a variety of ways and in increasingly intricate art forms, from hand-drawn or printed text to highly-stylized title cards.
The late 19th and early 20th centuries saw frequent testing of new title techniques, including lighted projection onto the screen and in-frame speech bubbles conveying an actor's dialogue. The innovations also led to the advent of what we now call subtitles, or on-screen translations for viewers who don't use the original language presented audibly. Modern subtitle types also include a service known as "supertitles," which are projections of translations on screens displayed over live performances, like operas.
In modern parlance, captions differ from subtitles in that they provide a description of all speech, translation, and additional dialogue or background noises. Closed captions are frequently described as being able to be "turned off," like the closed captioning services offered internally on televisions, streaming services, or even YouTube videos. Open captions, conversely, are permanently fixed and timed to a film and the images on the screen, harkening back to the inventions of early silent filmmakers.
New technology has also introduced the idea of automatic text-to-speech services and AI-generated captions, explained Pat Krouse, Vice President of Operations for speech-to-text company Rev(opens in a new tab), which provides captioning, subtitle, and transcription services to creators, companies, and educational institutions.
"Years ago, if you wanted to get captions or special subtitles, those were a really slow, expensive, arduous process. You had to either hire full-time employees — like some of the big studios do — or you had to manage an army of independent contractors or vendors. So there's a lot of work, and overhead, and it took weeks and weeks. You're paying people to go through it with very limited technology and literally just listening, pausing, typing things out," Krouse said. "Technology has really improved these things in in the last couple of years."
The film industry's long journey toward accessibility
The shift from silent movies to "talkies" essentially excluded most deaf and hard of hearing people from cinemas, starting a century-long, ongoing journey to get back to accessible viewing experiences for all.
Members of the Deaf community immediately sprang into action as artistic intertitles fell out of use, Volger explained, including Cuban American actor Emerson Romero and Granville Redmond, a friend and cinematic colleague of Charlie Chaplin. In 1931, high school student Emil S. Ladner Jr. joined other deaf protesters in demanding a return to accessible films, writing, "Perhaps, in time, an invention will be perfected that will enable the deaf to hear the 'talkies,' or an invention which will throw the words spoken directly under the screen as well as being spoken at the same time."
Captioning questions have danced around the elephant in the room: Why not simply bring back "old school" versions of on-screen text?
A decade later, Romero would invent a simple captioning system(opens in a new tab) that spliced intertitles into "talkies," to produce what he labeled "captioned films." This was added to growing European technology that chemically cut out letters on film to create "burned on" subtitles — a process that would later standardize the white lettering of captions and bring about the description of open captions as being "burned in" or permanent. Volger explained that in the 1950s, Dr. Edmund Boatner and Clarence O'Connor, founders of Captioned Films for the Deaf, Inc., became the first to routinely etch captions directly into film frames, bolstered by a 1958 law(opens in a new tab) that expanded access to captioned educational content.
It wasn't until the 1970s that television broadcasts would offer versions of what we now know as closed and open captioning, first invented and displayed by public station WGBH(opens in a new tab). In the 1970s the station produced the first open captioned program with Julia Child's The French Chef on PBS. The 1980s saw the first closed captioned children's program (Sesame Street) and the introduction of nationwide real-time closed captioning via the National Captioning Institute.
At the same time, new non-broadcast technologies were being created to make films more accessible. WGBH developed an external caption service called "Rear Window Captioning," which involves a clear plastic or plexiglass sheet mounted in front of a viewer with captions projected onto it from behind.
Later, flexible, wire-armed caption devices (known as CaptiView) would become the most commonly-offered accessibility contraption, using small, beeper-like devices that fit in cup holders or clip onto seats and display scrolling captions. In the 2010s, Sony introduced the Sony Entertainment Access Glasses, which project captions on the wearer's glasses lens. Globally, innovators have designed third-party caption apps for phones and tablets that sync up to a film's audio — some of which have launched to live theater audiences in the U.S.(opens in a new tab)
But the constant push for new tech obscures a broader implication toward deaf theatergoers. "These devices convey captioning to the individual user on the false premise that the rest of the audience do not want to be 'bothered' by captioning. In other words, the deaf and hard of hearing patron has to endure discomfort of these goggles or contraptions for the presumed comfort of everyone else," said Howard A. Rosenblum, CEO of the National Association of the Deaf(opens in a new tab).
The FCC has mandated closed captioning for video programming distributors(opens in a new tab) (covering satellite, cable, and subscription television) since 2006, but movies remain sparsely regulated. Ironically, the passage of the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act(opens in a new tab) left the legal fate of captioning up in the air for many years, leaving captioning regulations out of its early version and relegating the decision to lower courts.
In 2010, the United States Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) required a movie theater chain to offer closed captioning and video descriptions, "unless the theaters could show that to do so would amount to a fundamental alteration or undue burden.(opens in a new tab)" In 2012, the National Association of the Deaf won a federal district court case mandating Netflix caption all of its online content.
In 2015, the state of Hawaii passed a law requiring movie theaters to have a minimum number of open-captioned showings(opens in a new tab) of first-run movies, against pushback from the movie theater industry. Other local governments, like Washington, D.C., and New York City, would go on to pass similar limited laws. In 2017, movie theaters were mandated to make it known to consumers when caption equipment was available on site.
For the most part, captioning questions have danced around the elephant in the room: Why not simply bring back "old school" versions of on-screen text?
"Ask deaf and hard of hearing people who use closed captioning at movie theaters and you will get many stories from them about malfunctions, battery problems, disconnects, missing dialogue lines, mix-ups of captioning from the wrong movie, limited quantities of the devices, physical discomfort with goggles, difficulties keeping the cupholder contraption in the line of sight, staff errors, and much more," Rosenblum explained to Mashable. "By contrast, open captioning provides deaf and hard of hearing people with truly equal access in that they can go into the theater and watch a movie without any extra effort or having to secure any equipment."
What goes into making the big screen accessible?
As movie theaters amble through the process of making physical spaces accessible, it's easy for the specifics of captioning processes to get bogged down by the confusing array of information provided to the public at large. "If you look up the dictionary definition of what open captions are, they don't even really fit that description anymore," explained Volger.
The long social and technological history of captions has merged into a more streamlined, digital ecosystem. While the manual labor needed to hand splice, draw, burn, or project captions used to provide a sort of cover for the lack of access — relegating captions to a demand- or budget-restricted decision — the advent of digital editing and digital projection systems in theaters has removed much of this concern from the equation. Advancements in AI — which, with the right oversight, have the power to revolutionize many different kinds of accessibility resources — have also advanced speed and simplicity.
Now, open captioning and closed captioning production processes, and how they are added to visual media, are essentially the same, explained Volger. Open captioning in theaters no longer requires a separate, etched film reel, but uses nearly the same digital system as at-home closed captions. "With a digital production system, you can turn open captions on and off [like closed captions], except that it's at the discretion of the movie theater, rather than the choice of the end user."
Krouse explained how captioning works for a service like Rev. "Our processes are what's called 'humans-in-the-loop,'(opens in a new tab) where it is human and software together, doing things much more efficiently. There's a software called ASR, automated speech recognition. People just broadly call it AI. What that will do is go through first and generate a rough pass that is, depending on the service, anywhere from 70 to 90 percent accurate." Then, trained human editors go through the transcript to review for accuracy and to sync the timing of captions with visual indicators, leading to the production of a "sidecar file" that can be distributed in different file types depending on need.
It's stubbornness from within the industry that's forced this community out of theaters.
Volger added that filmmakers themselves will often include guidelines for captions, additional story context, and other documents used to ensure accuracy when requesting captions. Professional captioning services also design and apply captions based on industry and federal standards, either defined by the ADA or the Federal Communications Commission (FCC.) The FCC demands more detailed requirements, Krouse explained, such as "atmospherics and specific formatting," like descriptions of offscreen sounds and the precise movement or placement of captions between shots. Other deaf and accessibility advocacy organizations, like the National Association of the Deaf, have established their own captioning guidelines(opens in a new tab), as well.
The onus of open captioning thus begins with the film's production team making it a required step in the post-production process. Caption files are then added to a film's digital cinema package(opens in a new tab) (or a DCP), which is handed off to distributors to offload to film festivals or movie theaters. Studios and production companies do have a hand in ensuring there is funding and priority for adding captions, though, and some studios are known to buck the responsibility more than others, Volger said.
Independent companies thus act as middlemen between a range of creators, filmmakers, educators, and industry elites, and the evolving tech needed to make audio-visual translations easier. "People recognize now that when they create a piece of content, it's a responsibility to make sure that it's accessible, and it can reach the people that it's intended to," Krouse said. "There's a wide recognition from a lot of people across all industries that that's kind of just a part of what they need to be doing."
Even if a filmmaker and their studio ensure caption files are in a DCP, though, the inclusion means nothing if movie theaters don't actually choose to turn them on — which, from a technology perspective, any theater with a digital projection system has the ability to do or not do, Volger said.
With tech speeding up, he added, conversations are shifting back around to the visual style of captions, and the use of audio-visual translation as a storytelling or an artistic device. Examples of unique approaches include the 2013 Virgin America safety video featuring Todrick Hall(opens in a new tab) and a sea of dancers performing above expressive moving captions emphasizing key words, which Volger uses as an example in his own classroom.
More recently, Michael B. Jordan's Creed III(opens in a new tab) added an artistic element to subtitling American Sign Language (ASL)(opens in a new tab), used by Jordan's character with his on-screen daughter, Amara, played by actor Mila Davis-Kent, who, like her character in the film, is deaf. Instead of traditional, stark lettering in white or yellow, the subtitles in this film are displayed in white with an ombre color overlay matching the scene.
These efforts illustrate the potential of incorporating inclusivity as an aspect of creative expression, rather than viewing accessibility as a distraction.
"It's really part of the art," Krouse explained, noting how hands-on many film and video creators are in their captioning process. "To make sure it reflects the story that you're telling in that language, that it fits within the scene properly. They typically want to make sure that it's not being done by some third party who doesn't have that artistic eye."
Looking for leadership beyond the market
If the technology is there, then, why do so many movie theaters refuse to provide more than a few open caption screenings? The current excuses, Volger asserted, are skewed concepts of cost and demand, and a lack of political action.
"A common argument the movie theaters make is that they will lose customers if they 'force' everyone to watch a movie with open captions. I think that argument is changing over the generations. If you look at the kids today, a lot of them use them on their own devices, and I think that acceptance could be a lot higher than what it was before."
Perceived customer loss from increasing showings with open captions is paired with studio perceptions of the cost it takes to create captions. But price really isn't a relevant barrier anymore in the billion-dollar industry, as speech-to-text advancements have lessened the workload relying on human-based captioning services.
"Technology has really lowered the bar for this. In the last couple of years, the level of accuracy you can get at such an affordable price point is kind of mind blowing, compared to where this was 10 or 20 years ago," Krouse said. For example, FCC-compliant (also known as "burned-in") captions for a two-hour piece of content can be provided for about $400, according to a Rev representative. A shift to digital moviemaking formats and digital projection systems in the 2000s(opens in a new tab) has eradicated many pricey in-house technical barriers to screening open captioned films, as well.
In many ways, it's stubbornness from within the industry that's forced this community out of theaters. "For too long, deaf and hard of hearing customers have been relegated to second-class status and excluded from true access at theaters," Roseblum said. "We have had to drive to far-away locations just to see an open captioned showing, endure a terrible weekday showing time, suffer closed captioning contraptions that don’t work just to be told, 'Sorry, come back and try again another time!'"
Volger explained that in the movie world, some studios fall short of providing proper captions for their films, and "there's no way that a movie theater can force them to." What activists really need is greater protection under the law, providing enforcement mechanisms that would apply in the private and public spheres to both studios and theaters, he added.
This demand is a near-perfect reflection of the larger fight for disability inclusion, in which a fairly straightforward process is continuously impeded by a lack of political decision-making, unjustified assumptions about demand, and a misunderstanding of our nation's own history.
Without federal mandates for distributing and displaying open captions, filmmakers, studios, and movie theaters have treated them as an afterthought, leaving moviegoers with disabilities and their advocates begging for even a mere acknowledgment of the text accessibility tool that's right there for the taking.
"For disability activists, demand hasn't ever been enough," Volger said. "The marketplace has never really been a way to sort out these things."
Within the art and consumer world, however, groups have the power to call for political action and to make a cultural change, recognizing the importance of on-screen captions for accessibility advancement, but also acknowledging the text as a historic art form. With the rise of nostalgic content(opens in a new tab) and the longing for old methods of media-making(opens in a new tab) and art, it's about time to revive a silver screen relic with the tools of today.
Want more news on tech and accessibility delivered straight to your inbox? Sign up for Mashable's Top Stories newsletter today.
