Donna Williams: the heavenly delights of deaf life

Donna Williams is a deaf writer and blogger living in Bristol and studying part-time in Cardiff. As well as being a postgrad student, she’s a BSL poet, freelance writer, NDCS Deaf Role Model presenter, and occasional performer. In dull moments, she blogs as Deaf Firefly about what she sees as a silly world from a deaf perspective! After writing a few downbeats blogs recently, here she writes about the upsides of the deaf experience… (including a nice plug for this site on its first day – which we were very pleased about! And shameless in including. Ed)

Ooh dear. The last few posts have been fun to write, and very cathartic, but I wonder if I’m getting too down on the world. Really, it’s not that bad. I was led to realise this last night, when I settled down to watch LoveFilm’s latest offering, Nina’s Heavenly Delights.

I recently bought myself a post-xmas present, from me, to me, an iPad2. This will become relevant to the story. I put the DVD in my laptop. I made myself comfortable – Penguin biscuits; check. Cushions; check. Refreshing drink; check. The menu screen came up. Play Movie, Scenes, and Play Trailer.

No setup or audio options.

No hidden button (that I could find anyway) saying “for subtitles click HERE”.

Sighing and wishing that LoveFilm made it more clear on their listings whether a DVD is subtitled or not, and plotting a new email asking about such, I took out the DVD, put it back in its envelope and got ready to seal it, ready to send it back the next day. Wait a minute… hold the phone.

Didn’t I download an app a few days ago…? Quick, have a look… yes! Yes! Yes!

Subtitles! That’s the name of the app, Subtitles, and it has access to oodles of files of subtitles for oodles of films. Simply search the title of the film and the app will find subtitles for it. Not only that, once you’ve downloaded the subtitles, the iPad will display the subtitles in sync with the film (just make sure you start them at the right moment).

Literally, portable subtitles. This is fantastic. Who came up with this? I need to know so I can nominate them for a medal. But the test – would the app be able to find subtitles for a film so apparently low-budget that they couldn’t even be arsed to put subtitles on the DVD, despite it being made fairly recently in 2006?

Yes it could! So the DVD got a reprieve, was put back in the laptop, and I was able to enjoy a film that didn’t come with subtitles for the first time in… well, ever. Ever. And I checked, and it seems that it also has subtitles for Sanctuary, a DVD I bought many moons ago only to be bitterly disappointed when I discovered it wasn’t subtitled. I’m so happy about this I’m actually giddy.

True, it wasn’t perfect, the subtitles weren’t totally in sync so occasionally I had to tap the button to skip on a bit, or rein them back. It meant I had to concentrate a bit more on keeping up with the film, but that’s not the point. The point is that I was keeping up with it, a heavenly delight indeed! And enjoying it, despite a tendency to fade to black just as things were getting interesting. What a marvellous app, just needs a little ironing out and it’ll be perfect. Portable subtitles. Marvellous.

And this led me to consider; the 21^st century in the UK isn’t so bad for the deaf after all. True, we still have to put up with a certain amount of ignorance; if you doubt me just read some of my previous blogs.

But look what we have now.

Smartphones. I couldn’t live without my BlackBerry now. Emails, text messages, Whatsapp, Facetime, Skype, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, there’s so many alternatives to the humble telephone now that I wonder why most corporations still haven’t caught up.

My mother is also deaf, and tells me that attitudes have really improved since her time; some of her stories are worthy of a blog post to themselves.

Subtitles on a lot of TV content, even if it’s going backwards at the moment with the current fashion for ‘live’ subtitles – what utter crap. Why live subtitle something that’s not being broadcast live? It just annoys.

I digress. Subtitled cinema, and now for those films that aren’t subtitled, portable subtitles. Did I mention the portable subtitles? Now we need a version of that for plays and theatre, oh wait, we do, STAGETEXT. Big events like Sencity and Clin d’Oeil. iPads with all their wonderful apps and delights.

There’s so much going for deaf people right now that we’ve got to capitalise on it and try and make this world even better.

More subtitled cinema! More captioned and interpreted plays! Banks that routinely offer text message services to deaf customers! Legal requirements for DVDs to be accessible! Sign language lessons for children! More interpreters! Dream big!

We’ve already got smartphones, emails, social websites and portable subtitles. How can we improve things tomorrow? If you’re like Charlie Swinbourne, you’ll set up a new website for news, info and opinions about and for the deaf community, and call it – what else? – limpingchicken.com. Naturally.

Update: Turns out the app doesn’t work so well on TV series. Donna posted this update the day after writing this blog!

What do you think the upsides of deaf life are? Leave your comment in the box below!

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