Deaf and hearing-impaired Australians will be able to join in the full cinema experience for the first time since Laurel and Hardy with new technology bringing captions to the big screen.
Speaking to ZDNet through an interpreter, the chairperson of the National Working Party on Captioning, Cathy Clarke, says it's a positive step for the deaf and hearing-impaired community, which represent 1.7 million Australians.
"[Hearing-impaired and deaf people] have not been able to watch films at the cinemas since silent films were replaced with sound," Clarke said.
As of May this year, open caption films will be available to distributors through Tripod, a United States captioning company which captions approximately 50 films per year.
The three major distributors: Hoyts, Village and Greater Union will show as near to new released films throughout Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Brisbane and Perth.
"So far, all development in captioning has been in television and video. This gives the [deaf and hearing-impaired] community the opportunity to see films as they first appear," Australian Caption Centre General Manager Alex Varley told ZDNet.
According to Varley, there are two types of technology used for captioning - open and closed.
Open caption technology involves burning the dialogue and descriptions of sounds onto the film, a similar process to subtitles.
Australia opted for open caption technology as movies can be shown in existing cinema complexes on conventional projection equipment, Varley said.
A public inquiry into open-captioned films was set up a year ago by the Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission after a complaint from a representative of the Deafness Council of Western Australia, Dr John Byrne.
The commission convened a forum involving representatives from the Australian Association of the Deaf, the Deafness Forum, the Deafness Council of WA, the National Working Party on Captioning, the Australian Caption Centre and major film distributors and exhibitors.
The agreement only guarantees caption films be released throughout capital cities in Australia. However, Varley says there will be an eventual rollout through other cities and major regional areas.
