By Dr Ryan Bramley, Lecturer & Researcher, University of Sheffield
Providing subtitles for audiovisual content is a must — but what happens when those subtitles aren’t good enough?
We’ve just shared our ‘Six Recommendations for Change’ in a new research film, ‘How can we improve subtitles?’, featuring VoiceBox’s very own Head of Department, Sophie Muller! In this guest blog, I reflect on some of the other key things I’ve learned whilst researching this important topic.
When we started our research exploring how Deaf BSL users experience suspense in film in 2022, we had a simple premise: “nothing about us, without us”. It’s a phrase often associated with disability rights and advocacy work, but I would argue that it applies to any research project. Given that our core research team — myself, Beth Evans, Dr Kirsty Liddiard, and Jon Rhodes — have no lived experience of being d/Deaf, this mantra was non-negotiable.
Through conducting online interviews with several Deaf people, our research found that poor captioning often stops Deaf people feeling suspense, which in turn makes Deaf people feel excluded from the cinematic experience. Poor captioning can be anything from overly complex language, to a lack of information about who is speaking.
There’s another interesting example of poor captioning from a film that has generally been praised for Deaf representation: A Quiet Place (2018).
None of our Deaf research participants knew that Regan Abbott, a main character played by Deaf actress Millicent Symonds, was wearing a broken cochlear implant in the opening scene. Whilst hearing audiences heard the static from the broken accessibility aid, the only information provided in the accompanying subtitle was [silence]. Anyone who has watched A Quiet Place will know that this broken cochlear implant plays a key role in the film’s plot, so right from the get-go, Deaf audiences are left behind by a single, poor caption.
Had we not made the decision to employ a Deaf Advisory Group from the outset, there’s a good chance we would have never completed this research project.
Why? Little did we know, there isn’t a BSL sign for the word ‘suspense’! So, Dr Celia Hulme and Dr Tyron Woolfe, two of our Deaf Advisory Group members, worked together to design a sign that would help communicate this key term to our research participants (you can watch a clip of me using this sign here).
Incidentally, at a recent conference at UCL, I had the honour of being given my own sign name by a Deaf person: the same sign we used for ‘suspense’! Make of that what you will…
‘Sign names’ are just one of the many, many things I learned about through doing this research project. Here is a list of four things I’ve learned from researching subtitles for d/Deaf audiences. Whether you’re just starting out on your own content-making journey, or you’re working on big film and TV productions, I hope there’s something that everyone can learn and apply from the work that we did.
1. Don’t treat subtitles as an afterthought!
In VoiceBox’s recent blog post about Peppa Pig’s brother George (and his use of a hearing aid), Sophie Muller wrote this about accessibility:
“When it’s an afterthought, often there isn’t the time to fully understand the space.”
I couldn’t agree more. Indeed, one of the main recommendations that emerged from our research with d/Deaf people was that close collaboration on accessibility is needed throughout the production process, and not just as something to bolt-on at the end.
When accessibility hasn’t been factored in from the get-go, issues undoubtedly arise — and that goes for more than subtitling. I remember Sophie telling me about an audio description job her team was asked to do for a 30-second advert. The catch? There was only a couple of seconds in the clip that were speech-free — hardly enough space to drop in a useful voiceover!
2. Explore new, creative methods to solve common captioning challenges
Subtitles are an important accessibility tool, but that doesn’t mean to say they can’t be fun!
For example, during a particularly suspenseful scene — such as the opening scene in Jaws, where the music gets louder and quicker as the shark gets closer — what if the subtitles got larger and more animated?
We had a go at showing what this could look like in one of our previous research films, ‘Animating Inclusion’. We don’t have quite the same budget at the University as Stephen Spielberg did, but we gave it a go, and had a lot of fun making it as well.
Creative captioning is about more than just aesthetics, though. As Drs. Pablo Romero-Fresco and Louise Fryer wrote in ‘The Accessible Filmmaking Guide’:
“Creative subtitles allow subtitling viewers to spend more time on the images, helping to bridge the gap between the experience of the original viewers and that of the viewers to translated/accessible versions, while at the same time providing an exciting opportunity for collaboration and innovation between filmmakers and translators.”
3. Increase personalisation options for captions
We’ve just looked at how content creators can customise their captions, but how can we also ensure that our audiences are able to tailor their captions to their own needs?
I saw a wonderful example of personalised captions recently: ‘Mixmups Ultra Access’. Mixmups, on Channel 5’s ‘Milkshake’, is one of the UK’s most popular and critically acclaimed TV shows — and a big part of that success is due to how accessible it is.
Mixmups Ultra Access is an interactive TV services which offers children over 4,000 different ways to watch, tailoring viewing for d/Deaf, disabled, Blind, and neurodivergent audiences. Users can also combine their preferences, so you could choose ‘Big Subtitles’ and ‘Simpler Visuals’ if you wanted to. You can literally mix-up your access!
I love this quote from Rebecca Atkinson, the Writer and Creator of Mixmups, and inventor of Ultra Access®:
“Most deaf pre-schoolers can’t read subtitles, and many can’t yet sign. Audio description only gives half of the picture and children with processing difficulties need a slower pace. As a disabled creative myself, I wanted to give every child a way into the world of Mixmups.”
Still not convinced? Give it a go!
4. When making big decisions about captioning, consult the people who use them!
There’s another honourable mention for VoiceBox’s Sophie Muller here:
“I’m of the opinion that while it’s not necessary to design [subtitles] together per each individual project, it is necessary to have consultation with anybody who uses captions. And as I’ve said before, I do think that the deaf community must come first with that.”
We should acknowledge the expertise that professional subtitlers bring, whilst also recognising gaps in their own lived experience, and how these can be addressed. Surely, if you’re not quite sure on how to navigate a particular subtitling challenge, it makes sense to run this question by d/Deaf people first?
Yes – doing this additional accessibility work comes at a cost. But when you see how financially successful fully accessible content can be, can you really afford not to?