Most people don’t have to think very hard about going to see the latest movie in the theater, but for millions of Americans, things aren’t that simple. If you’re hearing or vision impaired, getting the necessary apparatus to provide you with amplified sound or scene descriptions can be a real pain, if they’re even available.
Actiview [1]is a startup aiming to make accessibility in movie-going as simple as opening an app. And to kick-start the venture, it’s going to be available for the nation-wide debut of Cars 3.
The problem is simply that the technology used for accessibility hasn’t kept pace with the rest of the world. The custom hardware setups, from established cinema audio and infrastructure companies, are clunky and expensive; a theater may pay thousands to get enough gear to be in compliance with accessibility laws.
And although some technically interesting solutions exist, like Sony’s closed-captioning glasses[2], it’s usually a chore to get them — it can take half an hour for the manager to be found and the devices to be set up. And while one theater may have one device, another may have a second, or none at all.
Sony’s AR subtitles are neat, but expensive and pretty clunky.
Was there really no solution that provides every form of accessible content easily to anyone who needed it? Alex Koren thinks you have that solution in your pocket already.
“My phone is such a lifeline on a daily basis, why can’t I use that?” said Koren in an interview with TechCrunch. “Industry veterans recognize this, but it falls by the wayside.”
The phone could show captions, it could carry audio, multiple languages, scene descriptions, all provided from a central server...
Read more from our friends at TechCrunch