after years abroad, steffani cameron returned to ottawa to a disappointing welcome. despite being hearing impaired, cameron regularly enjoyed live theatre and, to mark her homecoming, she’d planned a night at the national arts centre.
but without captioning, the threads of audio that reached cameron’s hearing aids weren’t enough for her to piece together and she struggled to understand the performance.
“i didn’t hear any of the dialogue, i missed 90 per cent of what was going on in the show,” she said. “i came home crushed. this experience that i thought was going to be my canadian welcoming home and everything just left me … depressed.
“i mean, i saw opera in croatia, and it was completely closed captioned.”
closed captioning transcribes audio to text, both spoken words and non-speech elements such as sound effects and speaker identification.
cameron works part-time doing captioning, seeing firsthand how captions improve the accessibility of film and television. but when attending conferences and council meetings, where captions are hardly ever offered, she is always aware of the difference they would make.
captioning is essential for the deaf, deafened and hard of hearing — people like cameron — who are nearly five per cent of the population, or 1.3 million canadians, according to the most recent data from statistics canada. the canadian association of the deaf puts that number much higher, at 10 per cent, estimating that 3.8 million canadians have hearing loss, with more than 380,000 estimated to be profoundly deaf.