The politics of captioning

This week I have been organising an event for the local Deaf community. This is part of our assessment for a module we are doing called “Auslan for Social Settings”. It is a really good idea – gets you out there meeting and speaking with the local community and is a chance for students to give back to the community, some of whom very generously volunteer as native language users in our classes from time to time. Usually these classroom events take the form of us students grilling the Deaf volunteers about all aspects of their lives!
Anyway, a classmate and I have opted to put on a shindig for the AFL grand final. My mission last weekend was to scope out some likely venues. Requirements were that it was kid-friendly, had lots of TV screens, enough space for our group and that the proprietors would agree to turning on the game’s captions. This turned out to be harder than I thought. I traipsed around 5 venues in Civic and 3 in Woden. The main problem was lack of big TVs and lack of seating in same areas as TVs. Had visions of our group having to either choose between standing for 3 hours and watching the game, or sitting for 3 hours and not seeing the game. I talked to a couple of managers and most were receptive to the idea of turning the captions on, although none knew exactly how to do it. I basically kept going until I found a club/pub I thought would fit the bill. My search ended at the sports bar in the Southern Cross Club in Woden – TVs everywhere you look, including a big projection screen for special events. The only catch was the Sunday manager said the shiny, modern flatscreen TVs couldn’t receive captions. I was sure this was BS, but didn’t think it would further my cause if I started raving on about the Disability Discrimination Act then and there. Fortunately, I found out that the Saturday manager was a different guy, got his number and rang him on Tuesday when he returned to work. He thought it was fine to turn on the captions, providing he could figure out how to do it – he needed to check with the reps who supply the TV equipment. He had a meeting with them on Thursday. I started getting nervous at this point. What if they said they would put the captions on and then don’t on the day? Then I thought about what it is like for a hearing person in a bar watching sport – you often can’t hear the sound anyway – it is either off or drowned out by chatter. So was this a moot point anyway? If hearing people don’t expect access to commentary in a pub, should Deaf people? And then I wondered about whether live captioning is annoying to some people on the footy – the commentators are usually just drivelling on about nothing to start with – receiving that drivel with a 10 second delay in written English with creative grammar might mean lots of Deaf people don’t bother with footy captioning. In short, I began wondering if we really needed captions. This was quickly followed by the realisation that I had blithely stepped into a political minefield. I felt an underlying uneasiness of knowing that as a hearing person, I was in the process of making a decision that would potentially deny Deaf people the choice to use or not use captions. And that is the point – they should have the choice. Hearing people have the choice to have the sound on or off (even if it is drivel) and Deaf people should have the equivalent choice. The club has since confirmed that captions will be available. Fingers crossed!