access denied
16 October 2007
I know most of you don’t think about it. You want to watch a dvd? You toss in in the player and hit play. And you’re happy. Along these lines, any dvd player will do.
Me? Not so much.
The aggravating thing is that you don’t know without trying the dvd player whether or not it’ll play captions. There is no other way to find out. Manuals won’t tell you, and indeed it’s maddening that some dvd players in this day and age will actually not play captions.
It was an emergency to find one that would, last week. My trusty little captions-playing dvd retired without notice. Nice! Except maybe not so much. The replacement player I found didn’t play captions, but would play subtitles only, which is about as pleasant as walking home in the rain. It gets you there, but it’s not very fun. No sound effects, no inflection markers, no indication of whether dialogue was onscreen or offscreen, and to add to it all, the subtitle quality varied from dvd to dvd.
Oh, and to add insult to injury: singing? Wasn’t subtitled. FUCK YOU CLOWN.
First world problem. I understand that. Nevertheless, I have this crazy idea that I’m as entitled as anyone else to watch dvds with captions should I so desire.
So I returned the replacement player, and the gramma insisted that the poor Best Buy victims hook up dvd players to a tv until I found a dvd player that would actually *gasp* allow the captions that were enabled on the tv to show up while the dvd was playing.
It took three tries.
And personally? That’s three tries too many. It shouldn’t be that hard to find a dvd player that does captions, never mind finding documentation on the captions, should a player elect to not do the right thing and enable television-based captions.
Access. It shouldn’t be a trial.
You’re right. Why should you have to go down the street and around the corner (metaphorically speaking), when all it should take should be a few steps and the push of a button?
How can I, as a hearing person, make it better?
You are so right! It shouldn’t be that hard but the kids in the stores just want to hand you a box. You would think that information would be in the manual or, even better, on the box!
This should not be that complicated!
100% totally agreed. :/
My nerdy side is wondering where the captions would be getting stripped in the video stream. I wonder if instead of reading in the unused line (used for captioning and other info) they just set it blank by default? *shrug*
Never get on the bad side of a gramma for sure!
The gramma kicks ass and takes names! Woot woot! But still - that really, really, really sucks. It should totally be in the list of features/specifications on the side of the box.
I’m right there with you! Though my point of view is the lack of audio description for the visually impaired. When DVDs were first becoming popular to own, a few titles came out with that as an audio track option (Moulin Rouge and Eight Crazy Nights are the two that I recall doing that, and it was only certain editions that included it). Many of the bigger name studios are recording those tracks so movie theaters can offer devices for the blind to watch there the described movies there. They’ve already gone to the expense of recording and syncing that track to the movie, yet they aren’t including them on DVDs! It’s very frustrating.
Go, go gramma!
That really sucks. Did you happen upon a particular brand that did what you want? Or was it a higher end model?
Aren’t grammas awesome? But seriously, she shouldn’t have had to do that. If the boxes don’t actually say what the DVD players do (and that’s a feature that they should all do) then the store should try to make it right without any gramma delivered punches.
That’s totally outrageous!
I feel for you! I had the same trouble several years ago. But I’ve had excellent luck with Sony DVD players. On tv, do you watch the CW? Is it captioned? My local CW station has apparently gone all digital (broadcast), and now nothing on that channel is captioned–I need a TV with both analog/digital caption capability.
PS Yay Gramma! : )
Crap. That sucks. I’ve only been reading for about 6 months (and I’m a poor commenter!) so I didn’t know you were deaf. It took a minute for me to catch on
Just as Karen asked — what can I (as someone who is not deaf) do to help improve this?
You wouldn’t think that it would be that difficult in this day and age. I wonder if it’s just the usual - “oh hey, we never thought of THAT” on the manufacturer’s part. But ridiculous. Completely, totally ridiculous.
Hey Rebecca!! If I were you, I would go on-line to the manufacturers and let them know about the difficulties you had. Also, for the one who actually had the capability, let them know it would be helpful to put it on the box!!
I’m sorry you had such a problem, and you are right to expect the technology to be widely available! Hope you are enjoying a good movie right now, with a couple of kitties warming your lap and those wonderful socks warming your toes!!
I hate hate hate it that the product displays don’t provide the necessary information. I don’t need captioning, but I’m mad that the DVD player I bought doesn’t have its own tuner. I can’t set the timer to record shows one more then one channel, because the DVD won’t tell the cable box to change the channel.
That’s not as serious as you not having captions, though. Frankly, it sucks that not all DVD players have the captioning ability. It should be standard, because, well. Obvious.
I agree. Y’all did the right thing, making it more hassle for them to find the captions. Hopefully somebody somewhere will answer the clue-phone.
I work with disability & access issues. You’re right. There is NO excuse for that.
(((hugs)))
That is ridiculous! Honestly I would think it would be a requirement at this point. There’s a lot of legislation for how much of broadcast TV has to be captioned (I work at a TV station) I would have thought it was the same for the actual equipment.
On a related note… have they started captioning the “extras” at all?
Yay for Gramma! Good thing you gave her that hat.
All DVD’s etc should come with captioning no matter what. I hear perfectly fine (sight’s a different matter) but the way people mumble or they track nowadays? I can’t follow half of it w/out captioning.