Finally someone has done something very obvious and necessary, but also very difficult, that hard-of-hearing consumers have been awaiting for years. Captionfish is a website providing comprehensive listings of closed-captioned movies at theaters all over the United States. It is a sophisticated search engine that finds open captioned, “rear-window” captioned, subtitled, and descriptively narrated movies along with zip-code locating of theaters closest to your home.
This is no easy feat and it took a team of developers with some pretty impressive credentials to make it work so well. DeafCode LLC was founded by Brendan Gramer, Chris Sano and Greg Millam, who all have three things in common: each of them is deaf, each of them is an experienced programmer, and they all have a sense of humor (from their web site: “We’re a bunch of deaf geeks. Seriously. Geeky.”) Brendan works at Amazon, Chris works at Microsoft, and Greg works at Google. Talk about having the bases covered!
I’ve used the service and it works well, alleviating my frustration at the listings in the newspapers and online which usually, at best, only identify which theaters offer captions without saying which specific movies offer the captioning or what kind of captioning they provide. Captionfish shows you which movies are playing in theaters near you and exactly what kinds of captioning they have. Rear-window captioning — where you plant a transparent acrylic panel in the drink holder in your seat, and it reflects captions displayed by an LCD panel at the back of the theater — is a lot of fun to use and works great. Descriptive narration for vision-impaired theater-goers is a fantastic service.
It’s only too bad more theaters don’t offer more of these services for more movies. For that we’ll have to wait for ongoing advocacy efforts to pay off. Anyone who wants to lobby for more captioning in theaters and on the web can get involved and get more information by visiting multiple sites starting with the Caption Action and Captioning Web blogs, and for comprehensive information about captioning and other media access technologies and services, visit the WGBH Media Access Group web site.