- It's always, always hard or it's frustrating when
you know I'm seeing a comedy and it's one of those things
where I was really far back from the stage.
I was thinking I could get by, I didn't.
And the end result was you look around,
there's people laughing, there's people having fun,
there's people getting these jokes.
And you're the only one in the room
that's just not laughing, not getting the jokes.
And it's that sense of isolation,
deaf people like me experience.
The thing is with these glasses is you've got that sense
of being a part of an audience which is an incredible
aspect of the glasses. (gentle music)
- [Narrator] We're at the National Theatre in London
to check out new tech they've developed that's helping
increase the accessibility of the arts.
- My name's Liam, Liam O'Dell.
I'm 22 years old, I'm from Bedfordshire.
I work as a deaf freelance journalist covering deafness
and disability technology.
But also of course theater.
I've been kind of seeing and reviewing theater
now for the past year or so.
And it's one of my favorite things to do.
(gentle music)
Deafness is always different from person to person,
but for me it's a lot about like deafness
related to distance.
I kind of have to chance it a little bit.
So I often try and get seats
as close to the front as possible.
Of course the more you kind of move away from the stage
the harder it gets.
- [Narrator] For people like Liam who have partial
or complete deafness, theater going is impossible at worst
and frustrating at best.
Many theaters offer captions displayed above, below,
or beside the stage.
But only for a fraction of their performances.
Not only does the limited number of captioned performances
present significant scheduling constraints,
that a general audience just doesn't encounter,
performances captioned in the traditional way
are also just not a great experience.
- With captioned performances the screen is at the side.
What you then have is, I kind of call it caption ping pong.
In a sense that you're looking at the,
looking at the stage, looking at the screen,
you're kind of looking back and forth.
And even in that little kind of glimpse away from the stage
something might be happening that you've missed.
- Kind of adjustable.
- [Narrator] So Jonathan Suffolk,
technical director at the theater and his team developed
an ingenious pair of glasses that display captions
on the lenses in real time.
- They are a piece of augmented reality technology.
Well the particularly tricky bit of making this work
is the speech following software.
It's not speech recognition, it's speech following.
When we put that finalized version of the script
into software that we've developed and we merge that
with digital information that comes from lighting
and sound equipment, and we merge all of that together
into a composite file which then triggers the captions
at times that are determined by a specialist captioner.
(gentle music)
- The glasses do offer that sense of integration.
(gentle music)
They're kind of right in front of you.
And it's there wherever you look.
It's projected kind of into your eyes as it were.
And what's great is that that doesn't confine you
to a certain seat with the captioned performances.
Or like a certain area, certain day.
You just need to pick whatever date suits you,
book the glasses, and then go and sit wherever you
want to sit to best enjoy the performance.
(gentle music)
- This is about being fair.
What we've done here is we've increased the number
of captioned performances from five
to 80% of all our performances.
And that's not perfect, but it's a lot closer to being fair.
(gentle music)
- Freedom of choice in terms of support
and services and access is invaluable.
They kind of place you in an ordinary audience
and you can go and see the performance
just like anyone else.
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