Subtitling and Captioning Campaigns

Spring has arrived, and with it seems to be some new campaigns on the horizon relating to subtitling advocacy. It seems more people are getting frustrated at the lack of captioning or subtitling that is available to them or at least have become more vocal about it online in an attempt to create change.

Just before Christmas last year, @sjmcdermid and @lovesubtitles spearheaded a change.org petition aimed at Amazon providing subtitling information and subtitles to their video on demand services. Formerly called LOVEFiLM the company has since rebranded to Amazon Prime Instant Video presumably to match the brand in other countries. The petition gained a huge number of signatures but what is truly disappointing is the lack of response from Amazon themselves.

Another campaigner has set up a different petition, this one aimed in the direction of BSKYB requesting subtitles be added to their video on demand offerings.

UPDATE: And another subtitling campaigner based in the UK is @whatshesay76 who has just launched a website.

It seems TV viewers in Ireland are not happy with the levels of subtitling offered to them by RTE, TV3, Setanta,TnaG and TG4. @SubtitleIreland have set up a Facebook page publishing responses to their enquiries as to why more content is not subtitled.

UPDATE: Robyn, got in touch to alert me to captioning campaign in New Zealand aimed at increasing the volume of broadcast output that is currently subtitled. The campaign called Caption It NZ has a blog and Facebook page. You can also follow them on Twitter @captionitNZ

Not to be outdone by individuals efforts to advocate, there has also been some activity with corporate backed campaigns.

Firstly the crowd sourced subtitled content platform @Viki has teamed up with @MarleeMatlin to launch the #billionwords campaign advocating for more subtitling globally in more languages.

And @121Captions is behind the @CaptionEverything campaign which has just recently launched.

Have I missed any? Are there other’s you know about? Comment below and I can update this blog post to include it.

Finally, it’s worth noting that wherever you are based in the world the CCAC for several years and has helped run and/or contributed to advocacy campaigns to get captioning in all sorts of scenarios – in schools, at work, online, at church, online and so on. Their most recent campaign surrounds the US Election and captioning election campaigns, but its members and participants consists of both users of captions and providers of captioning services spanning the globe.