Author series adds captions ... and raises question
After a year of correspondence with Wash-CAP, Seattle Arts and Lectures is making its popular Benaroya Hall presentations by prominent authors significantly accessible to patrons with hearing loss by captioning five of its 2009-10 events.
Captioned presentations include two Pulitzer Prize winners, an award-winning screenwriter, two food-and-travel authors, and a medical journalist whose work is profoundly influencing the national debate about health-care reform.
The captioned schedule is as follows:
Oct. 7, 2009 -- Annie Proulx, Pulitzer-Prize winner for The Shipping News and author of Brokeback Mountain, a short story that became a much-praised and controversial movie.
Dec. 1, 2009 -- Richard Price, author of the novel Clockers, which bears a strong thematic resemblance to the award-winning HBO television series The Wire, to which Price contributed, and screenwriter for many other movies.
Jan. 12, 2010 -- Jane and Michael Stern, food and travel writers devoted to America's back roads and to the unique and surprisingly excellent food one can find there.
March 9, 2010 -- Michael Chabon, Pulitzer-Prize winner for The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay and author of The Yiddish Policeman's Union, whose work consistently draws rave critical reviews.
May 3, 2010 -- Dr. Atul Gawande, a practicing surgeon and journalist, whose writing on health-care costs and quality have gained wide influence inside the Obama Administration.
All lectures are at 7:30 p.m. at Benaroya Hall in downtown Seattle. Because the captions will be visible from throughout the auditorium, patrons who want to see the captions will have the same array of ticket prices and options as all other patrons.
Single-event tickets go on sale Aug. 24. We have asked SAL to consider offering a season subscription to all of the captioned events.
SAL's decision to make the captions visible to all raises an interesting question. On the one hand, we appreciate being able to sit wherever we choose. On the other hand, because of the equipment required, universally visible captioning is considerably more expensive than captioning visible from only a portion of the auditorium, meaning that fewer events can be captioned. So the question is, which is better? We hope to get some feedback on that question as we work with SAL to plan future seasons.
By adding captions to its array of accommodations, SAL joins Seattle's Paramount, 5th Avenue and Seattle Repertory Theatres, as well as the Seattle Mariners and Seattle Seahawks, in making its offerings available to those of us who have a significant hearing loss but who communicate orally rather than through sign language. Those captioning efforts have been instigated at the request of and in cooperation with the Washington State Communication Access Project (Wash-CAP) in furtherance of Wash-CAP's objective of making Washington State a national model of accessibility for people with hearing loss.
