Deaf Friendly "Family Feud??" Could it Be?

Yesterday evening I was sitting down to catch an hour of TV before I started dinner. My son, Jake, was sitting alone in the living room. He seemed really relaxed, and then every so often he would yell and sign, “Matches!” “A lighter!” I walked further into the room and saw what was happening. He was watching an episode of “Family Feud” and really getting into it. The question had been for them to name ways to start a fire.

The next round up, I joined him at the front as Steve Harvey asked the next question: “We asked 100 men what you would be most likely doing on your day off?” We pushed on our imaginary buzzers, but there was a problem: The captions were slow. So, by the time I yelled out, “Play golf,” Jake had already gotten the number one answer, which was “Work outside in the yard.” A few minutes later it happened again…and again…and again. This show was definitely not deaf-friendly.

During the Fast Money round, I couldn’t keep up. It was fun to try, but not realistic to think about going on the actual show.

Jake turned to me after the show. “Mom,” he said, looking disappointed, “They should have a “Deaf Family Feud” with interpreters and questions written on a screen. (Isn’t he the greatest?)

I agreed with him, of course. All game shows should show equality, don’t you think? Even the older ones should come back on and be deaf-friendly. That’s what Jake and I think, at least.

But if they ever do fix “Family Feud” to be deaf-friendly, they’d have to have a Deaf host. Not necessarily because of signing (though that’s a big part of it), but because Steve Harvey annoys every inch of my being. “We asked 100 men and women what they like about Steve Harvey as a host of “Family Feud.” The answer by a landslide was????? NOTHING!!!!

WHAT? WHAT? WHAT DID I MISS?

When a person is born without or loses one of his five senses, the focus by many is on the loss and how, after the fact, that poor person misses or loses so much. Whether it be losing your sense of taste and not being able to enjoy chocolate anymore (yum), losing your sense of touch and not being able to decipher if something is too hot to hold at the moment (ouch), or having gas and not being aware that the people laying on the floor around you are, indeed, laying there because of you. Any way you look at it, it’s a loss to those who have all five senses working full-strength.

However, it goes without saying that losing your sight and losing your hearing may cause the most reaction from that person and those around him. The long-lived question of, “Which would you rather lose…your hearing or your sight,” almost always renders people feeling that losing your sight is the biggest problem. And I agree it would be traumatic, but so would be losing your hearing after you’ve spent decades enjoying music, having casual conversations, and such. Both would be traumatic. And, face it, there are very few people with both of these senses who wouldn’t really care if they lost one.

People think that, because I lost my hearing after I learned to speak, I am missing so much out of life. And I agree that it takes some working on to not go totally bananas. Before deafness I was a professional and amateur actress doing musical theatre. Not exactly something I can pursue anymore – especially living in the mid-west, in a spot where there aren’t many theatres around.

Movies aren’t as wonderful of an experience, but, now being deaf for a long time, I enjoy captioned movies just as much as I remember enjoying movies when I could hear. Finding theatres that offer captions for first-run movies is a bummer though, so I admit it grates on my nerves.

Plays and musicals are definitely not as exciting as I knew them to be. Watching an interpreter (when there’s one provided) and watching the action on the stage at the same time can be difficult (though there are theatres that directly address this situation by having the signers actually on the stage acting with the hearing actors). I miss theatre. I do. I also miss being able to sing (well). I used to have a great voice. I can say that now, because I no longer can control my voice and when I sing, dying dolphins would sound lovelier. I’ve told my kids over and over how well I used to sing, but, after hearing me as they’ve known me, I think they need more proof. I will say, though, that I took one of my kids to see an UNinterpreted production of “To Kill A Mockingbird,” last year and believe I enjoyed it every bit as much as my daughter did.

Then there’s small talk. Something I can no longer participate in with hearing people…at least not casually. I never liked small talk before, but have found that it does feel a LOT more isolating when you can’t joke around with people as easily. I still have a lot of sarcasm in my conversations, but many people don’t realize I’m just being a silly smart-mouth and just think I’m basically a witch.

But last night changed things for me. Made me see something more about my life.

One of my kids was going to be playing two different instruments in the school band concert. Because there’s no choir at this school (GASP!), it was a totally musical night—not something that really interests me anymore. And, no, if you’re wondering: feeling the musical vibrations in my butt does NOT excite me. After knowing and then losing music, vibrations and lights just don’t compare to what I know those hearies were hearing.

Anyway, she was supposed to play the xylophone in one song. The first time for her. I wasn’t thinking much of it. I mean, it’s the xylophone. I remember playing “Mary Had A Little Lamb” on that thing as a kid. Ooooo. (That was a sarcastic ooooo, if you missed it).

But when it came time for her to do the song with the rest of the band, I was flabbergasted! Amazed! Tickled pink! Stunned! I don’t know much about the song, but she was the star. She was banging on the instruments, going back and forth between two of them. Her sticks were flying and all eyes were on her. This was no, “Mary.” This was like Flight-of-the-Bumblebees-fast. And she ROCKED IT. I didn’t need to hear to know that.

After the concert, people she or we didn’t even know were running up to her and saying how COOL she was and I just stood there and glowed. That’s my daughter, I would’ve said if anyone had actually talked to me. She was good. I got to see it. And, even with the absence of sound I knew, I had witnessed something truly great. Do I feel like I missed out, because I’m Deaf? Not. One. Bit.

Yes, losing a sense is very traumatic if compared to never having the sense from the start. I guess I’ve been deaf looooong enough to be OK with it, though I know many who aren’t. One of these days everything is going to be accessible to people with a variety of  situations—including deaf people. I don’t know if I’ll still be alive when that finally happens, but I do know that I’m not going to sit around and be sad about it and waste my life concentrating on what’s been “taken” from me. I mean, really! If I were doing that, I would have missed my rock-star-daughter’s solo. And that would have been a travesty.

DON'T DUMB DOWN MY CAPTIONING!

Last night, as I sat watching, “A Few Good Men” (only THE best court movie ever), I began to realize that I was being gypped. What I was reading on my closed captioning did not match the movement on the speaker’s face. It was almost as if I was viewing an old Japanese movie, where the voice-over ends and the lips keep flapping. I was upset. I felt betrayed. Why wasn’t I being given fully equal access to the dialogue as everyone else? And who was deciding what was important enough to transcribe and what could be left out?

I’m an intelligent person. An educated person. I deserve to be “in the know” as much as anyone else who chooses to watch a television program or view a DVD. I wanted to know who was deciding what I would and would not “hear” the speakers say? Upon finishing my research, I discovered there are a couple of reasons why the captioning and subtitles might not exactly match the script.

• In some occurrences, some bigwig decided that, because people born deaf or early-deafened sometimes struggle with the English language, including reading it, they should dumb down the captions to make it easier to understand for the viewers.
  

Now, granted, I do understand why people whose first language isn’t English might not be able to follow complex English sentences with a lot of ease. But who is this bigwig to decide what is “too complex” or how it would be “better understood”? Besides, reading the captioning while watching a show can actually help develop a person’s English skills. If someone decides to change a sentence to a structurally easier format (in their opinion), you’re not only robbing pretty much everyone of the actual scriptwriter’s words, but of the possibility to help a person appreciate the English language. Not to mention that you’re stereotyping and placing the whole
of deaf and hard of hearing society into one category. Phooey!

• Sometimes the reason the captions are altered is because the captionist has to create captions whose reading time syncs with the viewing time of each clip or shot. Because reading time is generally shorter than what is actually being said in a given scene, the captionist is faced with the job to paraphrase what is being said before the scene or shot ends.

Admittedly, this is a good point. I understand that. Many a time I have struggled to follow captions that were flying by at an astronomically fast pace. I’ve even been known to yell at the television set, “Come on! Slow down already!” So, I do recognize that this places the burden of decision on the person doing the captioning or subtitles. Do they include it all, even though the clip is only four seconds long? Or do they paraphrase and leave out “unnecessary” extras, as is often the case?

In my opinion, I would much rather struggle to read the captions at full-speed than have the decision of which words and phrasing will be ignored made by some man or woman who hasn’t a clue who I am. What is this person basing their decisions on, anyway? Maybe that line, “I know what you mean, sir. I know what you mean,” could be phrased “I know what you mean,” and that be the end of it. And maybe they’re exactly right that the rest of that line is inconsequential to the storyline, but I don’t know this. All I know is that what I’ve just finished reading is obviously not exactly what they said, because they’re mouth is still moving. I don’t know what the left-out dialogue was. So, it doesn’t matter to me. I want to know what they said. Word for word. Tell me. If I have to struggle to read it all, I’ll deal with that. But it’s my decision.

• Yet another reason some people believe that captions are snipped here and there is for the movie makers to save money. This is untrue. Captioning companies do not charge by the word. So that “good” argument is out.

Be it right or be it wrong; be it subtle or be it blatant; captionists should not mess with the script. Tell us what they’re saying and what noises are being heard. That’s why we have the captioning turned on in the first place. Acting the part of “God” and deciding what will and will not be relayed is not only disrespectful and condescending, but it’s annoying as all get out, too.