I recently suspended my Netflix subscription, and today I canceled it entirely. Why? Because it no longer made any sense for me to be a member.
To compensate for the numerous errors in their movie listings for captions/subtitles*, I was cross-referencing their records with what I found in library catalogs and Amazon. I was incensed when I found that Netflix’s copies of Sherrybaby and Born into Brothels were not captioned- the copies I borrowed from my public library had been purchased from another distributor and did have captions. And when I wrote to make a suggestion to Netflix about making their caption/subtitle data more accessible, I was met with a rude response from a customer service representative. However, the straw that broke the camel’s back arrived when news broke about Netflix’s partnership with Roku to provide On-Demand movies. It’s an interesting innovation; too bad it doesn’t support captioning.
So today I decided “Why bother?” and quit Netflix. I have the luxury of being able to get my dvds elsewhere. Unlike many other online services, Netflix (tellingly) doesn’t ask for feedback when you leave, so I sent them a message through their suggestion form:
…
Dear Netflix,
When you roll out new features, such as watching movies “Instantly on your PC” (or more recently: Netflix’s partnership with Roku), please make sure the new feature is fully developed to accommodate *all* of your subscribers. As someone who has a hearing loss, I require closed captions or subtitles to view movies.
In addition:
–I have found the caption/subtitle information is incorrect (or missing) in a number of Netflix’s movie listings. Consider changing the way you import cataloging data (more accurate information can be found from library-based resources, such as WorldCat.org).
–On one occasion, I took the initiative to make a service improvement suggestion to Netflix, specifically about the way it reports caption/subtitle data to its subscribers. Instead of a simple acknowledgment of my suggestion, I received a rude response from a customer service representative.
–Finally, I am deeply unsettled by the way some of Netflix’s affiliate company, Red Envelope Entertainment, is spotty in the captioning of their films. For example: neither of the two copies of Sherrybaby I obtained via Netflix were captioned. The copy I obtained from the library (which was not directly distributed by Red Envelope Entertainment) *was* captioned.
When Netflix (or a rival company) takes steps to be inclusive of all its paying subscribers, I will be more than happy to restart my membership. Until then, I will send my dollars elsewhere.
Sincerely,
[my name]
…
Go here if you want more information about Netflix’s partnership with Roku, as well as ways to get in touch with Netflix, Roku, and the FCC.
* Puccini for Beginners, Gracie, and Iraq in Fragments are examples of movies lacking caption/subtitle information Netflix’s website (when I last checked), despite the fact that Netflix’s copies do have them.
My old laptop sort of died, and I was faced with the decision of a relatively expensive repair (which wouldn’t necessarily make the computer last that much longer) or replace it altogether. Since I had a term paper due yesterday, and laptops make it easier to burn the midnight oil, I opted to order a MacBook… which comes equipped with a camera! So here’s my first vlog…
…basically, I just say “Hey!” and announce that I’m kind of scared to do this because I’m still studying sign language. And yes, this video contains a lot of nervous smiling. Enjoy!
Last night, Hallmark presented Sweet Nothing in My Ear. The plot prominently features the cochlear implant debate, so you can imagine that a lot of people have something to say about it. But I don’t have much to add to all the reviews: I’m easily pleased. Considering my recent post about running without hearing aids, I was thrilled just to see Marlee Matlin’s character go for a run. Two thumbs up! Yay!
(By the way, thanks to the people who commented on that post- I’ve now been running for almost a month. I’m still a little wicked out of shape, but I’m enjoying it. I’m more relaxed now that I’m not fussing over sweat seeping into my hearing aids- imagine that. To help with motivation, I saw that Noi uses Nike+ for her workouts, so I looked around and found something similar (?) that works for me: the online training log offered over at Runner’s World.)
Today was Patriots’ Day, aka Marathon Monday (to those who live in Boston). I had the holiday off from work, so I was going to volunteer for the Boston Marathon, but I slept through my alarm like Rip Van Winkle. 4:30 AM wake up calls are hard!
When I finally woke up at 6 AM, I decided that the only appropriate thing to do was to get out of bed and go for a run. Then, after grabbing breakfast from Au Bon Pain, I sat down to watch the race on tv. When you watch the race in person, you really only get a snap shot of what’s going on. It’s pretty incredible to see the race evolve from elite to everyman, but you only see it from part of the race course. Watching the marathon on tv can be pretty boring- I was totally distracted by random internet things like this or this or this- that is, until the women’s race became an all out sprint between two runners for the last 6 miles of the race. It was so intense, I was sure one of them would spontaneously combust. From the NYTimes:
Biktimirova picked up the pace. Tune responded. Tune took off. Biktimirova responded. With 150 meters left, Tune spurted again, and this time Biktimirova did not respond. Tune won by two seconds — 2:25:25 to 2:25:27 — a distance of maybe 10 meters. The previous closest finish was two years ago, when Rita Jeptoo finished 10 seconds ahead of Jelena Prokopcuka.
A friend of mine has spent the last few months on a massive campaign to lose weight. She’s doing marvelously, and seems to feel so good about what she’s doing that it’s inspiring. It makes me want to pick up running again.
In high school, I was on the cross country and track team. I had a fantastic freshman year, with great teammates and a 5:36 mile for a PR. My enthusiasm for running sort of fell apart when my coach left. Her replacement was a woman who negatively impacted the team’s dynamics (but that’s a story for another time). Long story short, I stopped running.
For the years that I did run, I had analog hearing aids- and never encountered any problems with sweat interference/damage. However, last winter, I exercised a little too hard on the treadmill and damaged one of them. Fortunately, it was easily replaced under warranty (phew!).
Here’s the thing: If I start running again, I won’t be wearing my hearing aids. And since I’ve never officially “run while deaf,” I’m completely terrified by the prospect (as dumb as it may sound to some of you). I googled a few variations of deaf + running, but there doesn’t seem to be much discussion of deaf runners. It looks like one runner posted on a Runner’s World message board to see if there were other deaf/hoh runners on the site, but no one wrote back to her! This doesn’t exactly inspire a lot of confidence, does it?
So I have an appeal to make of you guys. If any of you out there are deaf/hoh and regularly go running solo without hearing aids/CI, please share your stories- I want to hear them! Then maybe I won’t be so nervous about hitting the streets.
Apparently, I.King Jordan likes his runs. That’s a start…
UPDATE: Just came across another post related to deaf runners (be sure to read the comments, which provide some context to Jill’s statement).
This is an interesting post that merges two knotty topics. Here’s the first paragraph, from Samhita:
A Republican California assemblyman proposed a bill that would deem pregnant women “temporarily disabled” in the third trimester of their pregnancy and allow them access to handicapped parking. The bill failed, but I think this is really interesting.
She then goes on to express concern that classifying pregnant women as disabled would attach the same kind of stigma we see attached to people who have physical disabilities that aren’t temporary. Namely, the stigma of being helpless, and needing the law to help us out.
There’s one practical reason why this bill failed. Not all women encounter mobility issues in their final months of pregnancy. Those that do can be given handicap parking stickers by their doctors. My roommate observed that where she’s from, they further solved the problem simply by providing maternity parking spaces. There are ways to address access to better parking for pregnant women without creating a redundant law.
Given that the law’s redundancy is really the issue here, it’s disorienting that there was so much discussion of disabilities and abilities over at Feministing. NicoleGW said it best:
A lot of the comments (and the original post itself) rub me the wrong way. As others have already mentioned, there seems to be a big problem here with people attaching stigma to the terms “disabled,” “handicapped,” etc., and being wary of attaching that same stigma to pregnant women.
Frankly, the issue with this approach isn’t whether or not pregnant women are disabled. The issue is that there is a sh-t ton of prejudice against people with disabilities.
Samhita concluded her post with a brief dicussion of the “disability” label itself and her resistance to using it. Personally, I’d appreciate her good-intentions more if she’d just call it for what it is. Whatever word we use to describe a group of people who exist outside societal norms is inevitably going to have a stigma attached to it. Why bother with a confusing and condescending substitute like “differently-abled?”
I love this quote, attributed to a commenter’s wheelchair-using friend:
I don’t care if you call me f-cking disabled, just put a f-cking ramp in front of your store so I can get in!”
I wish I had that kind of chutzpah!
Digression:
The news story reminded me of Brigitte Jordan’s Birth in Four Cultures. This was my favorite piece of required reading for an anthropology class in college (and this was another). In it, we see very plainly how birth in the US is treated as a medical (vs. natural) event. In other words: a mother is a “patient” whose pregnancy is a medical condition.
*Apologies if you found the title kind of misleading.
I recently blogged about captioning woes with Netflix. After receiving a couple comments expressing different data/experiences for the films I listed, I went ahead and requested two of the films through Netflix: Sherrybaby and Born into Brothels.
As it turns out, neither film produced any kind of captioning. Both were branded with Netflix’s Red Envelope Entertainment logo and “for rental only.” I’ve requested both dvds from the Boston Public Library to see if their copies are any different. That is, to find out if a) the non-rental dvds are distributed from a different company and b) they have the captioning that others have reported seeing.
So what is Red Envelope Entertainment, anyway? At first glance, it seems to be a distributing company of some kind, based on the logo branding I just mentioned. IMDb has a list of the films they’ve distributed, as well as a small list of films they’ve helped produced. There’s more information about what they do courtesy of Wired:
The company also has quietly become the exclusive distributor of more than 100 indie films, and it’s even starting to produce original movies. Netflix will make The Puffy Chair available to its subscribers, and it helped the Duplass brothers get a nonexclusive DVD distribution deal so the movie will be offered at Blockbuster and other rental chains, too. The company even teamed with Roadside Attractions to fund a theatrical release.
According to a blurb about Red Envelope Entertainment in Video Business by Marcy Magiera (sub req’d), it looks like Sherrybaby is only available for rental via Netflix. Since there’s apparently a captioned version out there somewhere, it looks like the only way to get my hands on it is to find a copy that’s been purchased for non-rental purchases (which is why I’ve requested these from my local library- their copies are just like the copies we buy off of Amazon). If my library experiment works, I’ll be happy to know that there’s an excellent alternative to Netflix.
It’s great that Red Envelope Entertainment is creating a friendlier market for independent filmmakers- and likewise, it opens up the market of films available to consumers. But it worries me that their exclusive distribution deals allow them to deliver a substandard product. So for now, I maintain my original sentiment: WTF, Netflix?
Maybe I caught up on Season 1 of Jericho too fast, because last night I had a dream where it was the Oscars…
During a fancy after party affair, I ran into Shoshannah Stern near a bar. I stumbled along as I signed, explaining to her that my ASL sucks ’cause I only started classes again last Summer. Then I told her that I had a guy friend who was dying to meet her. Oddly, this ‘friend’ was a surprisingly sweaty Skeet Ulrich (and wait, didn’t he already know her from their time together on Jericho?) I grunted annoyance at him for talking to Shoshannah instead of signing, but he ignored me. Didn’t he realize that perfect lipreading ability doesn’t exist in the real world? Guess not. Anyway, the amnesia-suffering Shoshannah and Skeet then disappeared from the party. Randomly, my former professor, looking a lot like Frank Sinatra, showed up as an acapella soloist. During a song break, he informed me that he’d decided that his post-retirement activities weren’t enough: he was pursuing pop stardom.
Huh. Imagine that.
In related dream events, I was a superhero in one of my coworker’s dreams. Nice, huh? My power was the ability to swap my hearing with others- temporarily making other people deaf. Kind of Johnny Storm’s experience in Fantastic 4’s sequel? …Except- you know- less flammability.
A couple years ago, I went to see Born into Brothels at the movie theater with my Dad. Like a lot of movies, I missed much of the dialog, but figured I’d just catch it with captions/subtitles on dvd later on. My plan was foiled when the film’s dvd was released without captions. So much for that.
I love movies- especially the smaller, independent films, because they usually have something to say that you don’t usually find in the mainstream. For example, a number of feminist blogs raved awhile back about a small film called The Education of Shelby Knox, a docudrama about a girl from Texas who fought for comprehensive sex ed in her town. I was excited to see this girl’s transformation from apathy to activism for myself, but when I received a copy from Netflix, I found that it wasn’t captioned. Great.
What these films all have in common is that they received wide critical acclaim, press, and advertising dollars. They were all produced by Red Envelope Entertainment, Netflix’s production company. And not a single one of them has English captions/subtitles.*
I’ve written to Netflix asking that they include captioning information with the “Movie Info” pop-up. It’s amazing to me that they’ll include information in this space about a movie’s length, but not whether it’s accessible. I also asked that they correct a listing they had for Daria: The Movie: Is It Fall Yet, since the copy I received did not appear to have captions. The result was a terse letter from one of their customer service reps telling me what I already knew: I could look at the complete record of a movie to find out whether it had captions/subtitles. They didn’t explain the situation with the Daria dvd, and the record still states that it has captioning.
I’m not a lawyer, so I do lack a complete understanding of the American with Disabilities Act and the Telecommunications Act of 1996, but I would imagine that Netflix is able to get away with this because Red Envelope Films is a relatively new production company, which probably makes it exempt from captioning laws for four years. Still, one glance at the sheer number of high-profile films they’ve helped produced in the last couple of years makes me doubt that captioning their films would be an undue economic burden.
Netflix has also come under fire for their past lack of TTY customer service line and the poor development of their “Instant Viewing” feature, which you can read about here, here, and here. The captioning of a/v material on the Internet is definitely a move I want to see happen. I am increasingly frustrated as high-profile blogs and news outlets increasingly substitute text-based stories with videos that generally lack any kind of transcript. Meanwhile, Project ReadOn is an amazing endeavor, and I’m blown away by Bill Creswell’s effort to caption movie trailers and other videos of interest to deaf individuals. But I’d like to see the ADA and Telecommunications Act updated in order to successfully adapt to technology’s constant changes.
By comparison, it seems like such a small request from some of us that companies such as Netflix start with the basics: caption their own films, ensure that their records are consistent and free of errors, and respond appropriately when customers point out such errors. Is that really so much to ask?
*UPDATE: A couple commenters have pointed out that some of these dvds *are* captioned. Here are the films that have been established as having captions/subtitles: 2 Days in Paris and Iraq in Fragments. I’d be interested to know if anyone has a trustworthy source for this data? For my work, I use WorldCat a lot, but am finding that the staff module is easier to use than the basic version I’ve just linked to — but the information on it is pretty sound, as far as language details go.
Update #2: I double-checked Born into Brothels and Sherrybaby - the versions available from Netflix are *not* captioned, nor do they have subtitles (more about this here).
I really should get flashing fire alarms installed in my apartment, but between the funky alarm system set-up my building has and my land lord’s inability to tend to little things like, oh, the constant drip of water coming down the hallway ceiling, this is probably not going to happen at this time.
Maybe by the time I do get around to it, horseradish-scented fire alarms for the deaf will be on the market. I know, it sounds completely bizarre, like something out of The Onion (or is it April 1st already?) But apparently Japanese researchers are hard at work on this and they do report that the smell woke 13 out of 14 test subjects. So the obvious question is: what if there’s a fire when someone has a cold? [via BoingBoing]
There have been some great posts recently, comparing the Deaf and LGBT communities. In An American Mom in Tuscany, Jodi quotes one of the commenters on her blog, Mark aka Drolz:
It was in the hearing world — the one where so many hearing people ignorantly assume I can’t possibly be happy unless I’m exactly like them–where I was under much pressure to conform. It’s in the Deaf world where I can belong, and effortlessly do so. In the hearing world I didn’t dare rock the boat because it was hard enough to keep up with everyone … ASL and the Deaf community give me an opportunity to express myself freely … I love pointing out that the Deaf community strengthened me to the point where I actually function better in the hearing world.
Jodi uses this as a jumping off point to discuss the parallels between Deaf and Gay community/identity. Others have used the “in/out of the closet” analogy to address the degree to which a deaf person embraces the cultural aspect of deafness.
In response to Jodi’s post, The Deaf Edge agrees with the analogy:
Gay by Nature, Proud by Choice is a slogan that us Deaf could borrow if you replace Gay with Deaf, because so many of us identify with that sentiment. You’re born with it, and it’s who you are.
Both posts are great- and I recommend reading them straight through, including a lot of the comments. However, it bothers me that both interpretations seem to insist on an either/or participation in the community. From Deaf Pundit again:
Then we just don’t know what to do with the proud oral deaf. They’re the bisexuals of our world. Not quite in the hearing world, but not quite in the deaf world either. They’re in their own world. Just like the gays and straights, we want them to just make up their minds, goddamn it and pick one side! But it doesn’t work that way, does it?
Then we have the semi-closeted deaf. They don’t use ASL. They use other communication modes and we’re annoyed at their refusal to just come fully out of the closet. A deaf person using SEE is like a butch saying, “I’m a lesbian, yes.. but I’m still going to wear dresses.”
These are the points I want to add:
Many people believe that sexuality exists on a continuum, not in rigid categories (such as gay/straight/bi).
Identities are constantly in flux, adapting to changes in environment, the company we’re with, etc.
People also express their cultural identity in different ways: not all gay men are flamboyant, not all librarians wear buns (actually, few do).
So what if we just acknowledge that hearing loss and cultural identity also exist on a continuum, evolving as needed? I would much rather subscribe to this idea than be an outcast from both the hearing and deaf worlds. It’s kind of a bummer to be ostracized.
P.S. One of Jodi’s commenter’s mentioned an article in the NYTimes from back in 1994- it touches on some of the same ideas that she was talking about.
