Joe Clark: Accessibility | Design | Writing

Refusal to support the Caption Movies Now Coalition

I support full accessibility for people with disabilities and have been working and volunteering to achieve that for 25 years. One kind of accessibility I support is accessibility of first-run cinema – not only to deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers through captioning, but to blind and low-vision viewers through audio description. I don’t support one access method over the other; we have to have both.

However, I need to state unequivocally that I do not support the organization known as the Caption Movies Now Coalition, even though their goals and mine may overlap. Apart from being yelled at and insulted by their lawyer in a 2006 meeting (he later angrily stormed out of that meeting), the Coalition refuses to support my research project. This, in the industry, is known as permanently alienating people who should be your friends. And it costs.

Posted: 2007.03.13 14:07

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