Slackers Deserve Subtitles, Too

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Tuesday September 23, 2008 · 8:38 AM PDT

2008/09/23 · 08:38

Dear Michael Moore,

I appreciate the fact that you decided to release your latest documentary onto the Internet for free, in an open, un-DRM-encumbered format for anyone to download.

However, I'm a bit less pleased with one particular aspect of how this was distributed.

You see, I have auditory processing disorder. I'm not hearing-impaired in the typical sense, but nonetheless, I do often have trouble making out what people are saying, particularly when there's a lot of background noise, a lot of reverb, or poor recording quality. And it's only worse when I'm tired or stressed; in cases like that, I sometimes even miss what people in the same room are saying to me.

Thus, I was very pleasantly surprised by the DVD release of Sicko, on which every single feature— not just the feature film, but every single bit of bonus content on the DVD— had a subtitle track available. (And the Tony Benn interview was awesome.)

But apparently I may have to shell out for the DVD of Slacker Uprising, rather than using the free download, if I merely want to make out everything that was said in it. And to add insult to injury, it's not even made clear on the promotional site whether the DVD has subtitles either.

Providing subtitles for downloadable movies is not unheard of; ironically enough, despite the fact that most Hollywood studios' online offerings lack captioning, bootleggers manage it all the time, and there are sites with time-coded subtitle scripts available for hundreds of feature films in numerous languages. Many video players such as VLC and MPlayer can seamlessly overlay subtitles on any video stream; all that's necessary is to put a text file in the same folder as the video file with the same name. And it's even possible now to embed selectable subtitles within an MPEG-4 file, in a format that can be displayed on the latest generation of iPods.

But even time-coded subtitles weren't a complete necessity; I realize, after all, that time-coding a script can be a consuming task. I could have dealt just as easily with a plain, untimed transcript with which I could follow along— just something listing all the words that are said in the movie, in some vague semblance of order. (And in fact, producing a time-coded script would actually be much easier if an existing transcript were already available.) Yet I don't even get that luxury with the free download.

And it should be noted that I'm not even the worst off here. At least I can make out some of the dialogue, if not all of it. Profoundly deaf viewers (who, it should be pointed out, are also potential voters) are left out of the loop entirely. I wouldn't doubt there's a group of deaf individuals out there somewhere who would like to have a showing of the movie but can't do so at the moment because of the lack of basic access. Non-native speakers who understand written English better than spoken— or whose English fluency is poor enough to require subtitles in a foreign language— are at a similar impasse.

Thus, I ask you to release, at the very least, a full transcript of Slacker Uprising, if not a time-coded subtitle script, to provide a greater degree of accessibility for this movie. Or if even that is too much, I ask you to encourage collaboration, perhaps via some sort of wiki, in developing an 'official' transcript for the movie.

It's no use, after all, releasing something for free to get a message out to the public, if it fails to actually get the message out.

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