First captioning awareness week to be held in November

The UK’s first captioning awareness week is to be held from 9–15 November, featuring captioned performances and live-subtitled talks to mark the 15th anniversary of captioning charity Stagetext.

Ten million people in the UK – one in six – are estimated to be deaf, deafened or hard of hearing. Stagetext’s captioning, which began in 2000 with a captioned version of the RSC’s Duchess of Malfi, makes theatre more accessible for people with hearing loss by displaying words said or sung in real-time on screens next to the stage or in the set. It includes information such as sound effects, speakers’ names and offstage noises, unlike opera surtitles for hearing audiences.

The week’s captioned events include a performance of Anita & Me at Theatre Royal Stratford East and a talk on the Ai Weiwei exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts. Arts organisations and caption users are also encouraged to participate in the accompanying social media selfie campaign, ‘I’m #CAPaware’, to increase the profile of captioning technology.