Comments on: Dear Disney & Pixar: Closed Captioning and Audio Descriptions are not “special features”

By: Liz

Liz — Wed, 19 May 2010 17:51:45 +0000

I am totally appalled by this! My boyfriend and I decided to rent “up” from netflix and we could not get the closed captioning on. We called “netflix” and they sent us another copy which again did not have closed captioning. When we learned that Disney decided not to have closed captioned we were shocked. I am hard of hearing and cannot enjoy movies without captioning. My boyfriend is not hard of hearing, but I cannot go to the movies with him because of my hearing loss. I really feel that something has to be done about this!!!

By: Jonny Germ

Jonny Germ — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 06:22:52 +0000

I’m having this same problem and I am indeed hearing impaired. But before I found this blog, I sent a load of emails to both pixar and that dvd help link above. Hopefully they’ll realize the gravity of their errors.

By: Anna

Anna — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 16:42:46 +0000

Sounds like it to me, too, Codeman. Thank you for the update .-= Anna´s last blog ..I am counting this as a win! =-.

By: codeman38

codeman38 — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 16:09:41 +0000

I just received an e-mail from Disney stating the following:

Thank you for your e-mail regarding the absence of closed captions from your Up rental DVD. The captions were inadvertently left off of the rental DVD. We regret any inconvenience this may have caused. We are working diligently to rectify this situation by shipping the corrected product to our accounts and creating a consumer program to address this matter. Since not all retailers will be able to participate in this program we will contact you once we have the specifics confirmed.

I’m getting more and more of an impression that what must’ve happened is something along the lines of marketing telling the production department “remove all extras from this DVD”, and their taking that a bit too literally.

By: codeman38

codeman38 — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 20:52:08 +0000

@Meg, Brooke: Same reason I use captioning myself– I have a very difficult time distinguishing speech from background noise and music, and with movie soundtracks, if you make one loud, you make the other loud as well. And that’s when the speech is clearly enunciated with a relatively light accent; if the character’s got a thick accent or tends to mumble things, I’m totally lost.

By: Brooke

Brooke — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 19:47:59 +0000

Oh good grief. Like Meg in comment 1, I’m not deaf but hearing impaired to the point where watching without CC is an exercise in frustration at best, and downright impossible at worst. Even when things are loud, I don’t do very well separating out individual words – therefore, the movie theater’s “helpful” solution of handing out headphones to hearing impaired people just DOES NOT HELP because making everything louder does NOT make it more clear. And they never fit right over my hearing aides’ speakers since they have to sit exactly right in order to pick up the signal, anyways. It’s so, so rare for me to watch movies in the theater anymore and my Netflix account gets quite a workout. So, feh on Disney.

By: LeeLee

LeeLee — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 15:58:09 +0000

Yeah, I had heard, just anecdotally, that Pixar has been pretty good about these things in the past. Hopefully, Pixar can be an ally of sorts, because if not, they deserve a side of the heaping dish of scorn that Disney gets.

By: codeman38

codeman38 — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 15:26:48 +0000

Er, sorry, I’m getting my Pixar DVDs mixed up. Finding Nemo only had one commentary (but it was subtitled). The Incredibles, however, had two— and both were subtitled.

By: codeman38

codeman38 — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 15:22:08 +0000

The thing that made this particularly irritating for me, incidentally, is that Pixar has gone above and beyond with accessibility in the past. On the DVD of Finding Nemo, not only was the movie itself subtitled, but so were the bonus shorts and documentaries; even the two audio commentaries had corresponding subtitle tracks, which was practically unheard of at the time and is still uncommon even now. And this has been standard on their DVDs ever since then.

By: codeman38

codeman38 — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 15:14:28 +0000

Oh, yes, and another issue: if the discs aren’t immediately recalled, video stores will continue to keep the uncaptioned version in stock until one of the discs breaks or is scratched to the point of unreadability… which means, essentially, that it will be just as impossible to find a captioned copy now as it was before.