Claire Hill: Providing live captioning for deaf people at Edinburgh Fringe!

It’s hard to describe the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in a few words, but after my first experience of captioning there in 2015, I came home shouting “it’s like a festival, but in a town!”

It combines the energy of a festival (talking to strangers, discovering artists you’ve never heard of and eating lots of takeaway food), with the home comforts of a town (being able to use toilets, sleep in a bed and take buses if the next venue is too far away). 

And it’s held in the most beautiful city in the world, and the sea is nearby – it couldn’t get any better!

It’s my fifth year captioning at the Edinburgh Fringe, and I’m still just as starry-eyed about it as I was at the beginning. 

This year I’m spreading the load with experienced Stagetext captioners Alex Romeo and Rosey Lock, who will be handling most of the scripted performances, and as a speech-to-text reporter, I’ll be covering the live captioned shows. 

This can be live comedy, or kids’ shows with audience interaction, but it can also be first-person narrator type shows, where the performer phrases it slightly differently every performance.

We rent one of those big Edinburgh flats and prepare our captioning around the kitchen table in the evenings.

This year we are captioning a record 45 performances, and new ones are still being added!  (Other captioned performances are available). But there are 3,500 shows at the Fringe, so it’s still a drop in the ocean. 

Unfortunately, accessible performances are a struggle at the Fringe – a lot of venues are in found spaces, so wheelchair access is often difficult, and there is very little spare cash for hiring a captioner or BSL interpreter.  

However, the Fringe Society have a Venue Access Award and encourage venues to promote accessible performances to their artists, and that’s where we come in.

We work with Pleasance and Underbelly venues, who offer their shows information about accessible performances at an early stage, and subsidise the cost of the accessible performance so it’s not all on the performers. 

Some choose to have two or three captioned and BSL dates, as well as relaxed performances which have a softer sensory environment.

Some of our shows at other venues have been booked direct with the performers themselves, or with the producing house if they want to offer captioning.

These include a Free Fringe show this year, The Empathy Experiment, as well as several shows captioning to tablets at Assembly venues.

The temporary nature of the venues means that it’s rarely practical to hang a caption unit above the stage, and given that each venue has about ten shows per day, with 15 minutes’ turnaround time between each show, it would be very difficult to get the cabling set up and the screen positioned in time. 

So we use a large plasma screen provided by the venue – it does mean that it is always to one side, which does lead to a bit of tennis head for the caption users (back-forth/back-forth) but it’s the best option with the limits placed upon us.

Although in previous years we were using a speech-to-text software which wasn’t great for scripted shows, this year we are using the standard captioning software, with three scrolling lines, so the style should be the same as in theatres. 

We’ve also got a set of handheld tablets for very small or oddly-shaped venues – the viewing experience can be tricky, with the viewer having to hold the tablet (although we’re working on some seat-back stand solutions) and change their focus length a lot, but for some venues like the 5m wide Assembly Roxy, it was the only option.

Because there are relatively few captioned or BSL performances, the ticketing system has some glitches in how it deals with them, and you need to be quite careful to ensure that you’re booking for the right date with the captioned/BSL access. 

The best place to start is the access bookings page at the Fringe website: https://tickets.edfringe.com/box-office/accessibility#book 

There are links to search filters for captioned and BSL performances, and details of the Access Bookings service, so you can get a free PA ticket if you want to take a friend. 

But be aware that if you search filtering by captioned and the date (for instance, the dates you’re visiting the Fringe), you will get all shows that are performing on that date AND that have a captioned performance somewhere in their run, not necessarily that have a captioned performance on that date. 

To check the dates of the captioned performance, you have to click on each show and then on the Accessibility Tab underneath to check the captioned date.

Wouldn’t a calendar view be better? I certainly thought so. So on my website, www.clairehillrealtime.com/edinburgh, there’s an embedded Google Calendar with all our captioned shows listed by date (for the Summerhall and other venues’ shows, you still need to use the Edinburgh Fringe website). 

Most captioned performances will say “Captioned” once you click on the date on the next page, but not all shows are able to fill in this box, so don’t be put off if it doesn’t say “Captioned” here. 

If you make your bookings through the Access Bookings service, they will hopefully flag up if you’ve chosen a date that doesn’t have your accessibility requirement.

This year, as well as the scheduled shows, I’m planning to provide free Captioning on Demand to audience members who book in advance. 

Inspired by the roaming BSL interpreters at Women of the World festival, I felt that the programming of captioned performances was being driven by the performers rather than the audiences, so why not offer the option to “add on a captioner”? 

Obviously I won’t have seen the show before, and the captioning will only be available on up to five handheld tablets per performance, but hopefully it will offer more choice to caption users, and convince venues that there is a market for captioning. 

It’s subject to agreeing a date with me, but we already have three of these booked in to provide captions for an arts professional who wants to see shows that either aren’t captioned, or aren’t captioned on the date she can go, so it seems to be working so far! 

Details of how to book are on my website as above, or start the conversation by emailing me at edfringecaptioning@gmail.com.

Claire Hill is a speech-to-text reporter specialising in theatre and arts events.  She is based in London but travels to Edinburgh as often as she can!