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BOSTON — Netflix will offer closed captions on all TV and movie
content by September 2014 as part of a settlement with a deaf
Massachusetts viewer who sued the company.
The on-demand Internet streaming service agreed to the settlement Oct. 9 in U.S. District Court in Springfield.
Closed captions are currently available on 90 percent of Netflix's content, as measured by hours watched.
"Netflix
has always been the leader in this, but it's a tall order to offer high
quality captioning on such a broad range of devices," spokesman
Jonathan Friedland said.
In the meantime, the company will display a list of available close-captioned content.
Captions
can be displayed on a majority of the more than 1,000 devices, from
computers to video game consoles, on which Netflix is available. But
many devices and operating systems, such as Google's Android, did not
exist when the company gained traction in the early 2000s.
Massachusetts
resident Lee Nettles, along with national and regional associations for
the deaf and hearing impaired, sued Netflix in 2010 under the Americans
with Disabilities Act, which prohibits discrimination based on
disability.
Other online streaming providers, including Hulu and Amazon, also have been trying to increase their captioned programming.
Beth Haller, Ph.D., is Co-Director of the Global Alliance for Disability in Media and Entertainment (www.gadim.org). A former print journalist, she is a member of the Advisory Board for the National Center on Disability and Journalism (https://ncdj.org/). Haller is Professor Emerita in the Department of Mass Communication at Towson University in Maryland, USA. Haller is co-editor of the 2020 "Routledge Companion to Disability and Media" (with Gerard Goggin of University of Sydney & Katie Ellis of Curtin University, Australia). She is author of "Representing Disability in an Ableist World: Essays on Mass Media" (Advocado Press, 2010) and the author/editor of Byline of Hope: Collected Newspaper and Magazine Writing of Helen Keller (Advocado Press, 2015). She has been researching disability representation in mass media for 30+ years. She is adjunct faculty in the Disability Studies programs at the City University of New York (CUNY) and the University of Texas-Arlington.
