Book review

A footnote on page 148 of Harry G. Lang’s new book, Turn on the Words! Deaf Audiences, Captions, and the Long Struggle for Access, makes clear the high stakes of media access. During a July 2021 live television interview, Dr. Anthony Fauci, a director with the United States (US) National Institutes of Health, was discussing the protective properties of the COVID-19 vaccines available to prevent death– but the caption on screen in error said that most deaths were in vaccinated people (instead of unvaccinated). Yet the captions being there on screen, in real time, is itself a remarkable technological and social accomplishment that has taken decades of innovation and advocacy. This is the goal of the book, to trace how captions came to US film and television, with specific attention to the role of deaf¹ grassroots organizing and deaf professionals working in education and government, and lay out the current state of organizing for media access for deaf and hard of hearing people. Lang, Professor Emeritus at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf at the Rochester Institute of Technology, has written 8 previous books on deaf communities across history. His latest book is an insightful contribution to the fields of disability history and history of technology, incorporating a few stories of captions in his own life, both as a former teacher of deaf students and as a deaf audience member.

The book is structured in chronological order across sixteen chapters, starting with the so-called ‘Golden Era’ of film, the time period during which all motion pictures did not have audio coupled with the moving images. When ‘talkies’ arrived in 1927 (p 8), access was actually removed, with deaf students in particular cut off from cultural touchstones once films became centered on talking and music (p 12). Walking through a regression of access as a starting point, the book traces a trajectory that defies simple narratives of techno-optimism and linear notions of progress. And the end of even this first chapter makes clear that deaf youth and adults were already dreaming and planning for bringing access to film (p.13).

There are several existing histories of captioning in the US. Karen Peltz Strauss’s (2006) A New Civil Right: Telecommunications Equality for Deaf and Hard of Hearing Americans is a history focused mostly on US federal legislation on communication technologies, including captioning, which Lang himself reviewed (Lang 2007). Strauss is a hearing lawyer and expert on disability access and legislation, who worked on several of the landmark laws she writes about. There is also Gregory Downey’s (2008) Closed Captioning, which uses history of technology and geography to trace speech to text in three contexts - film, tv, and courts. Downey is also hearing and situates work on captioning within a broader research focus on labor and information, which is reflected in his focus on the work of court stenographers creating transcripts, as one example. Additionally, there is even more recent scholarship exploring many aspects of captioning in the US, including gender norms (Reeb 2019), differences in deaf advocacy for captioned television between the US and the UK (Stack Whitney and Whitney 2021), and deaf viewers’ perspectives on existing captions (Butler 2019).

Turn On the Words makes distinct, critical contributions that complement these books and expand our understanding of how captioning came to screens in the US. While these books include mention of many of the same technological and legislation changes, Lang’s book greatly expands its examination of the people and often tedious labor required to make those developments happen. As he sets out in the preface, Lang centers his history on Captioned Films for the Deaf (CFD) (p. ix). CFD was incorporated in 1955 by a collective of deaf and hearing educators to create a network for sharing accessible educational and entertainment materials for kids and adults. While informal to start, the book traces the growth of captioning access - and how it moved from within deaf communities to formalized and nationwide. Consistent with his previous works, the book centers deaf lives and contributions on this path, arguably centering disability as narrative and epistemic resources (Garland-Thomson 2017). The book is focused on telling the story of US captioning history using interviews, archives, and other first-person accounts of mostly deaf people, from school children’s letters to education conference reports to tweets.

Also critically, the timeline goes right up to publication in 2021. As such, the book explores the rapidly changing landscape in the 2010s, such as the Twenty-First Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act of 2010 (p 215) that put new regulations on television programming and access. The US Department of Justice issued new regulations about movie theaters and captioning in 2014 (p 214), and the US Federal Communications Commission released quality rules for closed captioning the same year (p 232). As Chapter 15 makes clear, turning on the words is not done - the fight for access has continued as where and how people engage has changed, especially online, including social media and streaming platforms, such as ongoing lawsuits for missing or low quality captions (p 221) or the lack of captions on Zoom (249).

Despite the title, Lang’s book does make clear that ‘turn on the words’ is not an on/off switch. There are near endless choices about how and what to caption (see Zdenek 2015), and Lang demonstrates how deaf professionals were instrumental in making some of those choices from the beginning. For example, Chapter 2 introduces readers to several early deaf pioneers of captioning and film access, including Emerson Romero, a deaf actor who established the National Film Library in 1946 (p 15-17), who was deciding which words were ‘unnecessary’ (p 15) to remove to reduce the number of subtitles. Decades later, deaf educators and associations were still debating whether captions should be verbatim or edited (p. 166-167). And advocates did not win every battle, as the end of the book explores the end of public support for entertainment films and content intended for adult audiences, despite community desire to see those programs continue (p 197).

Following the growth and formalization of CFD, and the organizations that came after, showcases how grassroots and Deaf-led innovation was always at the forefront of captioning and accessible entertainment. As Lang’s book makes clear - deaf communities were not passive consumers and were not given access. For over a century, deaf individuals and organizations have been creating the technologies, networks, and movements for media access on their own terms while simultaneously working for structural reforms through federal legislation and rulemaking. I would recommend Lang’s book to anyone interested in US history, deaf and disability history, media studies, education history, or communication technologies. The barriers and breakthroughs he walks readers through establish that the captions achieved to date were not inevitable - nor is the future of captioning and broader information access guaranteed.

Kaitlin Stack Whitney
Department of Science, Technology & Society, Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, New York, USA
[email protected]

Notes

1 Lang uses both Deaf and deaf throughout the book, mostly using ‘deaf’ to refer to audiences generally – so I do here too.