Thursday, April 14, 2011

Why No Movie Subtitles on Flights?

It's been over 10 years since captioning was introduced. One place it has consistently never shown up is on planes. The airline industry keeps saying it's too expensive to add. How hard can it be to add in subtitle/caption support? Those little TVs and wall monitors can show the words. With some airline companies, the pre-flight instruction videos are captioned or subtitled. However, the movies aren't.

The circuitry is small and simple enough to be added to just about anything out there.

http://category.alldatasheet.com/index.jsp?semiconductor=CAPTION
http://www.brouhaha.com/~eric/pic/caption/

More can also be found on Google. It's a simple matter to turn on the subtitles if there's any. But to deny others enjoyment of a movie while on a long flight?

With portable DVD players getting cheaper and better, let's hope the airlines take notice of this. Keep spare batteries with you as well. Long flights can outlast batteries at times. Same goes with laptops with DVD players. Oh, wait, the airlines have noticed this but don't want to throw any money at it. Too bad. They'll probably have more satisfied flyers if they did.

3 comments:

CCACaptioning said...

Over a year ago, roughly, there was a strong letter signed by several organizations to the Airline Industry Association about this. Not aware of any reply or follow up. Go for it! It's important.
www.ccacaptining.org

J.J. said...

I used to complain about it...then I used to bemoan my computer or DVD player's 4-5 hour battery...then I got an iPad with its 10 hour battery...I am happy now.

It is not a battle worth fighting because most movies on airlines are movies I do not want to watch and I don't fly that often.

Anonymous said...

Ah about having closed captions on the flights? I think you are correct that they do put subtitles on their air safety program; however, a movie is different because they play different movies all the time unlike the air safety one. It does not excuse them for not putting the movie in subtitles mode since we have the capable technology to have them closed captions. It is a tragic for not allowing them to do their job to make Deaf/deaf/HOH/CI customers happy during the flight especially the very long ones like overseas.

Ironically, when I traveled to Japan, the movies were closed captions, but was in Japanese. Obviously, I am unable to read Japanese at this point. I do agree it is difficult of not becoming bored in those long flights. It is nice to have Sony DVD, which has 6 hours to 7.5 hrs battery live before it needs to be recharge. Those DVD are definitely expensive, which runs up to about 200 dollars the most. I do not blame you for being frustrated.

WisDeaf