Joe Clark: Accessibility | Design | Writing

Captioned music videos

I’m one of three people who can (and, in my case, will) take credit for legitimizing the concept of captioned music videos. In 1989, I wrote a guest editorial for Billboard explaining that music videos, as visual cinematic artworks, are of interest to deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers. (Text is not online. This was a while ago. At present, I also don’t have a hardcopy with me.)

My editorial, which received a few enthusiastic letters to the editor, followed the work of Ed Stasium, a record producer with a hard-of-hearing daughter, and Donna Horn, a marketing executive at the Caption Center (now at Captionmax). Stasium’s daughter put a bug in his ear about the inaccessibility of the videos for Living Colour, the band whose album he was then producing; Horn arranged for the captioning of “Cult of Personality,” not quite the first captioned video but the first notable one.

Later, I wrote a few more articles on the topic, available here:

  1. Don’t trust the “subtitled” version of Snow’s “Informer”!
  2. Basic article for Vibe (and boy, was that ever a disaster when it came out)
  3. Sidebar on vaguely typographic aspects

I still remain an expert on captioned videos. And I’ll be putting my money (or somebody else’s money) where my mouth is on that soon enough. Mark my words.

You are here: joeclark.orgCaptioning and media access
Captioning
Captioned music videos

Updated 2001.07.15

Homepage: Joe Clark Homepage: Joe Clark Media access (captioning, Web accessibility, etc.) Graphic and industrial design Journalism, articles, book