The ‘Accessible Cinema’ project promotes diversity through culture
The films ‘The Skin I Live In’; ‘No Rest for the Wicked’, ‘Cousinhood’ and ‘23-F’, all candidates for the Goya Awards of the Spanish Academy of Cinematographic Arts and Sciences with 33 nominations, have been screened in an accessible version for people with visual or hearing disabilities thanks to the ‘Accessible Cinema’ project of the Orange Foundation and Navarra de Cine.
The screening of the films includes digital subtitles for the film, displayed on a screen positioned below so as not to obstruct the view of the image.
The subtitles, in Spanish, follow a color-coding system used by deaf people that makes it easier to identify the dialogue of each main character through a different color. In addition, references to the film’s most relevant sounds are included as captions.
For their part, people with visual disabilities have personal headphones with adjustable volume, through which they can follow a description of the situations and the characters’ reactions, while the original sounds are heard through the cinema’s speakers. Alongside the cinema screenings, the commercial DVDs of all these titles include audiovisual accessibility.
During 2011, various fully adapted screenings of these films were held so that people with and without disabilities could enjoy a cinema screening together.
The ‘Accessible Cinema’ project, promoted by the Orange Foundation and Navarra de Cine, aims to bring culture closer to people with visual or hearing disabilities as an additional means of integration. It is an initiative intended to encourage people with disabilities to go to the cinema in the best possible conditions, in this case, with specific color-coded subtitles for people with hearing disabilities and audio description for people with visual disabilities.
