All the skills that are necessary for real life conversational situations are necessary for watching and understanding TV, DVDs and downloads for hearing impaired students. The most important element is the need to hear what is being said and that is often compromised by factors within the DVD:
- Background music
- Narration without seeing the narrator’s face
- Noisy crowd scenes
- Action packed films
- Several characters speaking at once
- Rapid verbal interactions
Captions provide the hearing impaired listener with the full message and the viewer can look at the action whilst reading the captions.
It is a common misconception that a hearing impaired viewer can’t read the captions and also see the action. Regular caption users become very adept at this skill in a relatively short period of time, allowing them to enjoy the DVD in a relaxed manner.
Media Access Australia’s targeted education initiative, the Classroom Access Project, has the tenets of inclusion at its core; and student access to captioned educational content is supported by our Accessible Education Database and Captioning Grant.
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