Sign Language Integration
Captions
Audio Description
The Wimbledon Effect Captioning for Theatre
There’s only so much neck swivelling a person can do
Theatre captions are a really important for deaf, deafened and hard of hearing audiences.
But the Wimbledon Effect makes reading captions and watching the action challenging.
Sometimes people watch the action and miss important dialogue. Sometimes we miss the action because we are reading the captions. So, as useful as captions are they can be frustrating and make us feel we haven’t had the full theatre experience.
Thanks to funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and Engineering and Physical Science Research Council (EPSRC) Red Earth has been working with colleagues from Arts and Computer Sciences at the University of Nottingham, to see if we can make it easier for audiences to catch action and captions together in a more satisfying way.
What’s even more exciting about the project is that we’re using exisiting immersive technologies to create captioning for all our shows, all the time, even in small scale and rural touring venues.
What’s happened?
We’ve developed prototypes for different kinds of captioning on stage.
We’ve tested these ideas out with deaf and hearihng chidlren, young people and adults
What will happen next?
We’ll take the kind of captioning people like best and develop it more
We’ll integrate captioning that works best in to our next touring show – Soonchild
We say, leave the Wimbledon Effect to tennis fans!
Amanda Wilde: Co-Artistic Director Red Earth Theatre
T: 01773 824 509
M: 07584 046 184
