Using a Samsung smartphone or tablet, viewers watch captions or subtitles at any session at participating cinemas via the MovieReading app, which uses the device’s microphone to recognise the audio track of a film and synchronise captions accordingly. Currently nine Space Cinema locations across Italy offer the service, including in Rome, Milan and Naples.
The new condition complements Screen Australia’s requirement, introduced in 2007, for all feature films to be captioned.
This initiative follows recommendations from the Federal Government’s Media Access Review final report, in order to provide around 600,000 Australians who are blind or vision impaired with access to audio described feature films.
The Broadway Accessibility/Audience Expansion Initiative enables theatregoers to view captions or listen to audio description at every performance of designated shows.
Using technology developed by Sound Associates, the G-PASSaccess services of I-Caption and D-Scriptive are both automated systems, delivering captions or audio description that are synchronised to the show’s cueing system.
