Annals of Bad Lipreading

“He writes for anonymous websites,” said Debby as a speaker took the lectern at a memorial service we attended this afternoon.

I turned that over in my mind, wondering about the legal, moral and ethical implications of such a pursuit. What were the perils of such ventures into the Dark Web? Exactly what kind of a person was this?

Afterward I asked Debby her thoughts about someone who trafficked on anonymous websites.

“Not anonymous,” she said. “Cannabis. Cannabis websites.”

My lipreading skills have gone to pot.

What you don't know is behind you could kill you

I'll be 77 this summer, and not a day goes by that there isn't a reminder of the perils of aging. Most of them, of course, are the normal ailments one suffers when one gets older.

But lately I've become more conscious of external dangers. A few days ago I was nearly run over from behind at the local park by a couple of small-child cyclists pumping the pedals as if the Devil was after them. They called "On your left!" but of course I couldn't hear them. Trooper reacted, but not in time for me to step aside on the path. The kids swept by uncomfortably close aboard, and Debby said, "You've got to do something."

So I did.

I now walk clockwise around the park path against most of the traffic, which normally follows a counterclockwise course. That way I can see my nemesis before it strikes me down.

I've also put a cyclist's rear-view mirror on my sunglasses so I can watch for unseen dangers behind me. Looks dorky, but it works.

In Catch-22 Yossarian constantly jotted down in a notebook all the horrible things that could kill him. By the end of the novel he had filled every page.

I'm getting there, too.

Solly, me, lipreading and Zim

Here’s a Facebook Messenger exchange I had yesterday with Alan Solomon, an old colleague from Chicago journalism (we were both on the Sun-Times before he went to the Tribune as a sportswriter; he’s now freelancing as a globetrotting travel writer).

Solly: Question: When you watch baseball [on TV] and there’s a conference on the mound, have you ever been able to read their lips?

Me: Yes and no. I can catch individual words but not the sense. A lot of lip reading is educated context-guessing, anticipating what will be said. A lipreader well versed in what goes on out on the mound will be able to do much better than me. But now the participants cover their mouths.

Why’d you ask that question anyway? Bar bet?

Solly: I’ve always wondered. The “hiding of faces” is a relatively new phenomenon; it always looks so silly, so I was curious to see if there really is a risk—or if it’s just a bunch of hooey.

Me: It is possible that a skilled lipreader (not necessarily deaf) who’s baseball-savvy enough to know the things that are said on the mound can steal stuff that way.

Solly: With most teams having a “video” coach in the clubhouse now to review close plays and advise managers on whether they should appeal, I suppose they could hire one who lipreads as well.

On the other hand, I know players who don’t want to be tipped off on stuff; Don Zimmer, when he played, was one of them. Having taken a fastball in the head, he feared being told a curveball was coming and leaning into the plate in confident anticipation—and discovering too late that an inside fastball was coming instead. Might be a plot device for you: murder by deliberately wrong tipoff . . .

Me: Hey. Mind if I put this exchange on my blog? Folks will find it interesting. I didn’t know that about Zim.

Solly: Absolutely—use it! Invoice will be sent asap.

The Lipreader's Stare

The other day one of those silly clickbait articles about body language one shouldn’t use in the workplace appeared in my Facebook news feed. It suggested avoiding a steady gaze at another person standing close by, for that might be taken for an attempt at dominance or aggression.

As a lipreading deaf person, I absolutely need to fix a laser stare upon an interlocutor’s face—especially if that person is a stranger—if I am to understand their speech. I’d never thought about it before, but there have been occasions in which folks suddenly squirmed away in apparent discomfort.

And so I decided to survey other deaf lipreaders on my Facebook friend list to see if they have encountered this phenomenon. Their responses ranged from the brief and flippant to the thoughtful and concerned, and I suspect say much about the kind of people they are.

Think of this blogpost as my lightweight contribution to scientific research into deafness.

L.G.: If the person is talking, no problem. If he isn't talking, it can feel weird.

K.G.P.: Yup, I've had people tell me that it makes them uneasy at first. I think I've subconsciously developed techniques to break that gaze now and then . . . "Oh look, a kite!"

E.R.: that's a tough one—I have not experienced that but have often wondered if my "stare" makes people uncomfortable. I try to look away while people are talking every now and then.

C.G.: I've wondered the same. Turn your head and you miss a key phrase or change in topic. Give a friendly approachable smile and then you find out their mother just died. There's the continuous effort to keep up with the content through watching the other person's body language and facial expressions. That probably does make some people uncomfortable to be scrutinized like that, but there’s not much we can do about that.

D.M.: Oh, that's a great question. I have been told that it makes some people feel listened to! Of course when I hear that I just let it ride, as I am listening but not in the way they probably mean. I imagine that taken to the other extreme it might be unsettling to some. Too, culture plays a role.

C.L.: It depends on the person's cultural background. Many farm workers won't look at me directly when I'm asking questions. Some women, especially in Muslim countries, shy from looking at a male's face for fear of inviting unwelcome advances. Most people get it that I am deaf and need to look at facial expressions and lips and realize that I'm not seeking a personal attachment. It shouldn't be more than “seven seconds too long" a gaze, as Dave Davis once said of his gaydar abilities.

C.W.: I stare at the mouth and I've had people start picking their teeth. I'm usually up front about my hearing loss and tell people I lipread, so I think that makes it okay. People who have bad teeth or cleft lips or whatever are the ones who are most uncomfortable with it, I think.

A.Z.R.: I've always wondered if people find it strange that I'm looking more at their mouth than their eyes. Are they trying to make eye contact, while I'm busy looking a few inches below their eyes?

R.C.: I agree I've made people uncomfortable. Men in particular think I'm overly interested in them. Such big egos they have! Never know what color eyes they have, but always know the state of their teeth.

B.K.: I shift my gaze constantly between the lips, eyes, eyebrows, expression, hand movements, boobs, etc., when someone's talking to me, so it's not like I'm staring.

J.W.: Yes. If the person doesn't know you, you have to be aware of the effect you may have and, if necessary, explain.

F.C.: I think most people find it refreshing—someone is actually paying attention to them! Other people take it as interested and that person may squirm away if they feel uncomfortable about your supposed interest in them (either sexual or romantic).

K.K.: Well, for starters, deaf/hard of hearing folks use eye contact especially for lipreading. It is common courtesy to face someone when communicating. As for staring, we do this at school as non-verbal cues to students to stop  disruptive behavior.  I have always found this useful as students don't like to stand out when called on verbally.

C.P.: It may be disconcerting but with a quick explanation of the need to lipread it's not an issue.

J.S.: Sure. And fuck 'em. 🙂

D.P.G.: That lipreading stare can be so powerful and bring out unexpected responses from increasing the gabbing to freaking out. Over time I’ve tended to not look directly at the person, or to say “No” when asked if I can lipread. It’s a superpower I prefer not to have.

A.D.H.:  I’ve had more positive than negative experiences with regard to my lipreading gaze. It’s due in part to culture—Israelis and Catalans both tend to gaze directly at a person’s face—so my lipreading gaze does not come across as unusual.

S.A.P.:  I would have said that it’s not staring if you blink every so often.

M.T.L.: Yes, I'm totally a lipreader and I've encountered many people who are unnerved by my need to watch them speak so intently, and I also tend to want to get as close as I can (though I don't feel I invade their space) to read their lips.

I've had people physically move away from me because they were unnerved by my concentration on their speech.

I see it more as their problem than mine.  One particular memorable incident was a new neighbor of mine in Atlanta.  I had met Peyton, the wife of the couple, but one day, Dave, her husband, came over and knocked on my door and introduced himself (can't remember what he wanted, I think to borrow a tool or something) and I invited him in and started talking to him standing in the entryway.  He was very unnerved by my standing close and watching his every word, and he physically backed up and got a strange look on his face.  Again, I don't think I was invasive of his personal space at all.

After I got to know both of these wonderful people and Dave realized I couldn't hear (I don't think I told him that day), we talked about our first meeting and how was weirded out by me.  We became good friends.

Most others who have done the same were not people I came to know well.

Now, if someone does shy away for this reason, I tell them right away that I'm reading their lips and it takes concentration and explain, "That's why I'm watching you so intently."

T.S.: I think  you are right about other people feeling uncomfortable with the gaze of lipreading, though with some qualification. I think this feels more threatening when coming from a man. And in fact if one is a woman looking at a man to lipread him, it is sometimes misinterpreted as being interested in him. Which leads to a whole different can of worms.

L.S. I agree. People aren't used to such contact, esp. these days with technology.

T.E.F.: Make sure you have cow eyes.

CaptionCall

A few days ago a CaptionCall came to my house. Will it become another electronic life enhancer for me? Quite possibly.

Designed for deaf and hearing-impaired people who can speak clearly enough to be understood on the other end of the line, the CaptionCall works very simply. The first party speaks into the handset and reads the second party's reply on the unit's large screen. The second party's spoken words are converted into text by means of speech recognition software and the help of a live "communications assistant" at the CaptionCall company's local office.

The communications assistant, who is sworn to secrecy (or something like that), monitors the other party's responses, stepping in to correct mistranslations on the fly. Speech recognition software still can make mistakes, rendering "Hallelujah!" into "I alluded," for example. Human intervention is still needed when context doesn't make things clear.

Among the interesting features are Caller ID, message reviewing after the call ends, message saving into memory, and a contact list for speed-dialing. One feature that has great potential for me is the ability to convert either voicemail or answering-machine messages into text. All I need to do is hold the handset up to the base of our separate Panasonic digital phone with answerer, press a button, and in a few seconds I can read the message.

In the past, when the Lady Friend's plane was delayed, she'd phone her sister or one of our sons with a new ETA, and the sister or son would send me an email with same. (Yes, she could send a text message directly, but that's pretty clumsy on the cell phone she has.) Now all she has to do is call home and, if I don't answer the phone immediately, she can leave a message on the answerer, and I'll get to it by and by.

The usefulness of the CaptionCall, it seems to me, will be greatest in communicating with family and friends. I can prepare them ahead of time for the drawbacks of this technology.

There is an unavoidable delay between the time the second party speaks and the words are converted into text by the computer at the CaptionCall office. People tend to pause between the phrases they speak, and these pauses can be misunderstood by the first party. Has the second party finished speaking, or is he just taking a breath? As a result, both parties sometimes speak over each other, confusing matters.

With time, the first party might get better at interpreting the length of the pauses (indicated by "." and ". . ." in the text).

At present I wouldn't try to use the CaptionCall for important business calls unless the second party can be prepared ahead of time. If I wanted to order a pizza, for example, I could explain on the fly what's going on to the other party, but it'll be rare that strangers will have the time, the understanding, or the patience to make the call work.

For some reason my particular CaptionCall unit won't show Caller ID. The unit might be defective, or perhaps the phone line in my 102-year-old house is flakey. (The Panasonic digital phone does show Caller ID just fine, so it's hard to tell.) CaptionCall and I are still working on a solution.

For all its glitches, the technology is advancing rapidly, and there's a good chance that in a couple of years these drawbacks can be minimized acceptably. The CaptionCall has been on the market only since late 2011. (For more information, go to CaptionCall.com.)

By the way, the CaptionCall unit is free to deaf and hearing-impaired users, and so are the calls themselves. The Federal Communications Commission pays CaptionCall by the call. There's absolutely no financial obligation for the deaf or hearing-impaired user.

I just hope the miserly Tea Party Republicans don't find out about it.

JANUARY 10: The Caller ID problem has been fixed. The phone jack in my office is faulty. Moving the kit and caboodle to another room solved the problem.

Draggin' dictation

When I saw David Pogue's breathless encomium to Dragon Dictation for the iPad 2 in his New York Times column, I said to myself, "Henry, you've got to try this one. It's free. And it might even work."

I have "deaf speech" that was once described as sounding like "rusty bathtub pipes." My production is breathy, my enunciation muddy. I'm understandable in a quiet room if my interlocutor pays close attention. In the presence of background noise or human impatience, I might as well be shouting down a bottomless hole.

I once took speech therapy until the returns began to diminish. At the age of almost 71 there isn't much point in subjecting myself to that kind of hard work anymore. After all, I'm not about to address the British Empire on the eve of World War II.

Still I hope for a breakthrough. Perhaps the easy-to-use Dragon Dictation app, which translates spoken words to text, might be a useful engine for sharpening my speech--if it could reproduce what I say with any accuracy. Perhaps a bit of practice would increase that accuracy, however incrementally.

So I downloaded it to my iPad 2 and gave it a try.

Here is what I said:

"In this grave hour, perhaps the most fateful in our history, I send to every household of my peoples, both at home and overseas, this message, spoken with the same depth of feeling for each one of you as if I were able to cross your threshold and speak to you myself."

Here is what Dragon Dictation said I said:

"Gran Mammo human Pidfile Net-Arping couldn't you think badly of voodoo mind him through okay Omega ring to message spoken with a PaymentInfo caring bridge women in favor and go to the print FoodGang. Close to you."

Your Majesty and Mr. Logue, you have nothing to worry about from the likes of me.

His mother's crotch?

I have a great deal of admiration for the people who provide instant closed captions for television news programs. Captioning on the fly with any amount of accuracy is difficult, even with the assistance of powerful computers. The job has to be done immediately; there's no time to look up things. But there's plenty of time to screw up things.

Sometimes a captioner has to render an unfamiliar name, word, or phrase phonetically and just hope the viewer gets it. The name of a long-dead economist, for example, might appear as "John May Nard Canes." When you think about that a little, it's clear, sort of.

The other night I was stunned when a local NBC newsreader seemingly reported that a police officer had cornered a suspect "in his mother's crotch."

Huh? Then I got it. We Chicagoans pronounce "garage" as "grotch."

Clearly the captioner wasn't from our neck of the woods.

Listening to the deaf

It does not surprise me at all that for decades nobody -- priests, cops, prosecutors -- would listen to, let alone believe, those 200 boys and men who repeatedly charged that they had been molested by the Rev. Lawrence C. Murphy at a school for the deaf in Wisconsin.

For millennia the deaf were not considered fully functioning human beings. Society thought they had nothing of importance to say. They had no credibility. Not even the people charged with their care and education took them seriously.

Black Americans once faced this dynamic. They were considered unworthy of the vote. But things changed, and now one of them is president of the United States.

Things are slowly changing for deaf people, too, as they shoulder aside prejudice and ignorance to become doctors and lawyers and journalists.

It's still an uphill battle. Individuals increasingly are accepting the human potential of the deaf, but it will take longer to overcome the inertia of society and its institutions.

Those Wisconsin lads have at last burst through the smothering, arrogant and ossified hierarchy of their church. People are now listening to them. It is a small breakthrough for all of us.

James Marsters

James Marsters with a TTY machine and a coupler, the first telephone device for the deaf. (Marsters family archives)

One of my old heroes died late last month, and all the big newspapers -- including the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times -- carried extensive obituaries this past weekend.

Jim Marsters, who died at 85 in Oakland, Calif., July 28, was perhaps the most consequential deaf person of his time. He lost all his hearing to scarlet fever as an infant, but he learned to speak and lipread so well that he brushed aside academic objections to his ambitions and earned a dental degree, later becoming a noted orthodontist and inventor.

In 1964 he and Robert Weitbrecht, a deaf physicist and engineer, developed a modem-like coupler to allow old wire-service teletype machines to communicate with one another over the phone lines. This was the first TTY, or Telecommunications Device for the Deaf, as it used to be known. For the first time, deaf people across America could "speak" to each other on the phone without the assistance of hearing folks. This was a genuine breakthrough, an instrument of liberation.

Marsters was also a champion of teaching the deaf to speak and lipread. That method -- not sign language -- had worked very well for him, as it had for me, and sometime in the late 1970s we met at a convention of educators and parents of deaf children.

During the course of our conversation it came out that Jim was a pilot and that he often flew his Piper Tri-Pacer to a small California town to provide free dentistry for the impoverished.

I was thunderstruck. "How can deaf people fly?" I asked. I had grown up thinking that one had to be able to use the radio to become a pilot.

Patiently Jim explained. Less than 10 per cent of American airspace under 18,000 feet requires the use of radio. Small airports do not have control towers.

It would be years before my sons had graduated from college and I had the wherewithal to learn to fly, but Jim had planted a seed that grew and grew.

The Wall Street Journal obit treats all the important events in Jim's life very well, but the Times obit fails to mention his aviation career at all, a curious omission given its importance in his life.

Worse, the Times obit begins this way: "Sign language, lip reading and speech training helped James Marsters get through college and dental school and made it possible for him to succeed as an orthodontist."

Sign language played no part in Jim's life, none at all. It is dispiriting that a newspaper as sophisticated as the Times would make such an error, such a leap into stereotype.

Deaf people are not all the same. We are as diverse as the rest of America. Jim's life proves it.

Kiitos

Saying "thank you" in American Sign Language

I was the victim of stereotyping the other day.

"How much is this?" I asked the hardware store clerk. "Ten ninety-five," she said, after scanning the bar code.

"Okay," I said, proffering a twenty.

She made change, handed it to me, and said "Thank you" in American Sign Language.

She had recognized my "deaf speech."

Not so long ago I would have bristled inwardly at the clerk's clumsy lumping together of all deaf people. We do not all speak sign language. Some of us prefer speech and lipreading. However imperfect our skills may be, they help us communicate with the hearing world on its own terms. We have chosen our path and those who believe in ASL have chosen theirs.

Age and experience, however, have led me to realize that in their blissful ignorance most hearing folks in this situation mean well. That clerk wasn't patronizing, trying to be kind, or showing pity. She was simply acknowledging my humanity, even though she may have been clueless about what specific part of that humanity I belong to.

"You're welcome," I said -- again in voiced English -- with a wink and a nod.

She beamed, even though she missed the irony that I had responded in her language.

For her our brief connection must have been a small blessing in a long day.

That was fine with me.

(By the way, "kiitos" is "Thanks" in Finnish. Now you know.)

Silence is unsafe?

You weird hearing people just slay me.

All these decades you've bitched about noise pollution, about the yammer of traffic.

Now that quiet electric cars -- you can barely hear the hum of the motors -- are the wave of the future, you're worried that their very silence might compromise your safety, according to a May 7 article in The Economist.

What if we can't hear an electric car coming? you ask. It'll run us over before we know it! We've got to find ways to make it audible, even to mimic the deep-throated song of a 12-cylinder Jaguar engine or the squeal of brakes in a panic stop.

Oh, please.

How do you think deaf people have survived so long in an automotive society? We can't hear sirens, horns, oncoming dumptrucks or speeding Porsches. Yet we manage. When was the last time you read about a car hitting a deaf person? Come on, have you ever?

Deaf folks are simply alert to their surroundings. We have learned to trust in the old Mark One Eyeball, among other senses.

And, admit it, all too many of you are deaf to outside sound when you turn up the speakers, when you (stupidly) converse on your cell at the wheel, when you plug in the earbuds of your iPods.

Wake up, nitwits, and count your blessings.

Pitching the books

The biggest book promotion problem a deaf author faces is how to reach a wide audience with "deaf speech." My breathy elocution is usually understandable to a stranger if he listens carefully but often goes right past the average person with part of his mind on something else.

In the past I tried all sorts of MacGyverish tricks to overcome that, one of them using an overhead projector to display a printed talk, line by line, the rest of the page hidden by two clumsily manipulated sheets of paper. That was like chewing tobacco while riding an unstable motorcycle.

But dispensing with the two shrouding sheets of paper caused audiences to squirm impatiently if they read the entire page long before I finished speaking the words.

Later on, "CART" -- Computer Assisted Real-time Translation -- worked very well with large audiences composed both of the hearing and what quaintly was called the "hearing impaired." As I droned on, an expert court reporter would (often with the help of a printed copy of my talk) keyboard the speech into a laptop attached to a digital projector. When everything went smoothly, my words would appear on the screen at the same instant I spoke them.

But this technology is expensive and is suited mostly to large audiences. I needed something cheap and effective for small groups, such as those at bookstore autographings (and, believe me, they can be very small -- two or three patrons).

And so now I use a Macbook laptop, a portable screen and a small digital projector to deliver my pitch by means of an Apple Keynote (PowerPoint to PC users) slide show. My words are superimposed on photographs that make up the individual slides, as in the picture above. I speak the words as I show each slide, letting each slide linger just (I hope) long enough for audiences to appreciate it.

From time to time during each presentation the Lady Friend, a retired librarian and elementary school teacher with a dulcet speaking voice, reads selections from my novels while I stand by.

That aids greatly with the biggest problem of Keynote and PowerPoint presentations: They can be excruciatingly boring. Listening to spoken words that also appear on a screen is a kind of visual waterboarding many people just can't endure.

Using simple and short sentences for text helps a great deal.

So does the use of striking photographs for backgrounds, to engage another part of the mind. (Army boot camp instructors used to salt their filmstrip lessons with pictures of nude women, keeping the recruits on their toes.) Fortunately, being an eager if not always skillful amateur photographer, I have a large portfolio of suitable pictures of my bucolic subjects. And there is always the Internet commons to harvest.

I've been working on a talk that will be delivered June 18 to the Ontonagon County Historical Society way up here in farthest Upper Michigan. The subject is how a regional mystery novelist uses location, history and culture to create a sense of place. Part of the task has been to go out and find good pictorial subjects for slides, and that's been great fun.

There's always more than one way to skin a cat.

Reading aloud

An eon ago, before audio books were invented, literate families used to sit in the living room while Father (or Mother) read aloud from the latest novel or biography or children's picture book. It was a social habit of the time, just as watching TV after dinner is a habit of ours. It's a pity that reading aloud is a lost art, for spoken words carry far deeper meaning than superficial action viewed on the screen.

"Reading aloud captures the physicality of words," writes Verlyn Klinkenborg in today's New York Times. "To read with your lungs and diaphragm, with your tongue and lips, is very different than reading with your eyes alone. The language becomes a part of the body, which is why there is always a curious tenderness, almost an erotic quality, in those 18th- and 19th-century literary scenes when a book is being read aloud in mixed company. The words are not mere words. They are the breath and mind, perhaps even the soul, of the person who is reading."

Maybe this is how one deaf child learned what Klinkenborg calls "the inner voice of the prose, the life of the language." When I was four, five and six years old, Mother and Dad set aside an hour after dinner just for reading aloud.

But they did not read to me; understanding them would have been too difficult for a deaf kid who relied on lipreading. Instead, I read to them. The books we started with were simple and full of pictures -- I remember Babar the Elephant -- and later on we graduated to such colorful adolescent tales as the Hardy Boys mystery series and Freddy the Pig.

One difficulty with deaf children's learning of spoken language is that so many of them get the words but not the music. They learn to put together literate sentences, but they are flat and two-dimensional, written in shades of gray rather than the colors of sound.

Reading aloud to my parents and brother, I am convinced, taught me the swing, the sway, the soul of language. I could not hear the words, but voicing them taught me subtleties of vibration I could feel in my larynx and diaphragm. Once I had learned about onomatopoiea and alliteration-- the busy buzz of bees, for instance -- I was on my way to soaking up the prosody of English. I had discovered that words have music as well as meaning.

That is one important reason I became a writer. (Another may be heredity; my father was both a superb prose stylist and a compelling storyteller.)

The terror of surgical masks

Yesterday I rode up six floors in an elevator with a small brown boy who was wearing wearing a surgical mask. Whether he was Latino or Indian or something else wasn't apparent, but I stood in the corner as far away as I could get. Would I have done the same if he were a white boy? I'm ashamed to say I don't know. Ingrained childhood racism is hard to shake entirely -- let alone fear of pandemics.

Last night I dreamed swine flu had overtaken the Chicago area and everyone wore surgical masks. This had me tossing and sweating, for I am a deaf person who reads lips -- who has to read lips in order to communicate. Suddenly I was unable to understand anyone. I could not deal with the waiter trying to take my order, with the salesclerk holding my credit card and shaking her head, with the police officer at the door of my car with his hand on his holster. Their masks prevented understanding. I was completely cut off from communication. I woke up in something very like a panic attack.

A friend of mine who is also deaf and a lipreader holds joint U.S. and Israeli citizenship. He was living in Tel Aviv when Iraq lofted Scuds into Israel during the 1991 Gulf war, and everyone wore gas masks during rocket alerts. He told me vividly of his discomfiture over not being able to follow spoken instructions, over being utterly in the dark about rapidly shifting events.

Now I truly understand how he felt.

Going to the movies

I used to go to the movies -- a lot.

Of course, growing up totally deaf meant I was unable to appreciate the sound track, let alone understand most of the dialogue. Much of that takes place out of camera range, and what is visible is often difficult if not impossible to lipread.

But I enjoyed the movies anyway. As a teenager I could neck with my girl friend in the balcony and pay no attention to the movie. Later on I could provide my own imaginary scenario and dialogue to fit the action and moving lips on the screen. (Sometimes, it turned out, my inventions were better than the real thing.)

I enjoyed subtitled foreign films, too, but there's one drawback to those: Subtitles only reproduce spoken lines -- they do not describe tone of voice, offstage sound and the like, all of which are important to a moviegoer's understanding. Still, subtitles were better than nothing.

When closed captions arrived on DVD movies as well as broadcast films, I could finally appreciate everything a hearing person does. Closed captions provide a great deal of information besides spoken dialogue -- they indicate who's speaking and what their tone might be, as well as offstage and onstage sounds. They even provide the lyrics to theme songs.

Small wonder that I stopped going to the movies for almost 30 years, except for one instance in which I reported for the Chicago Sun-Times on an experimental theatrical closed-caption scheme called "Rear Window." The viewer plants a transparent plastic panel on a gooseneck into his seat's cup holder. The captions are displayed backwards on the back wall of the theater, and the plastic panel picks up the reflection of that the right way around, but is invisible to patrons in adjoining seats.

Only a couple of theaters in the Chicago area had Rear Window, and they lay both more than an hour's drive from my home. The technology was promising, but it never caught on widely.

So lately I have been waiting for movies to be released as captioned DVDs, and that satisfies me. Of course the DVDs usually appear long after the films' runs in the theaters, which has kept me a step behind everyone else in water-cooler chat about popular culture.

The Lady Friend likes the movies, and if I won't go, she goes alone. Last weekend, however, she prevailed upon me to attend a local showing of "The Class," a nominee for this year's best-foreign-film Oscar.

Mere subtitles notwithstanding, I enjoyed myself immensely. "The Class" is an excellent French film, shrewdly and beautifully photographed. The art of subtitling seems to have advanced in the last 30 years -- the timing seems better, for one thing.

Much of my appreciation lay in the larger theater experience. The big screen gives far more immediacy and intimacy than even a big high-def television set. Modern movie cineplexes (this was the Century in Evanston, Illinois) are far superior to the cavernous old ones I grew up with. The rooms are smaller and seat pitch is much steeper, meaning viewers don't have to crane around heads in front of them.

And the same glorious aroma of buttered popcorn still wafts through the theater. It was as if I'd shed half a century of inaction and returned to fond memories of youth.

No, I didn't neck with the Lady Friend. Maybe next time.

Now this is how it should be done

Barack Obama's Change.gov website is now captioning the streaming YouTube video of the president-elect's weekly fireside chats. Here's yesterday's address on the economy:



To get the captions, start the video rolling. If the captions don't appear immediately, click the "up arrow" at the right side of the screen, then the "CC" symbol. You'll see the transcript, word for word as Obama speaks, at the bottom of the screen. (You could teach yourself how to read lips by turning off the sound, then glance at the captions as you focus on Obama's face.)

Now why can't the American news organizations do this with their streaming videos? There are a lot of hearing-impaired and deaf people in this country -- perhaps 20 million of us -- and regular captioning would attract a lot of new business to a news web site. Besides, goddam it, it would be the right thing to do.

(With thanks to Tina Davidson for the heads-up.)

Captioned radio

[TUESDAY 7:40 P.M. EST: THE URL FOR NPR'S SIMULCAST IS HERE. IT GOES LIVE AT 8 P.M. EST AND WILL CONTINUE UNTIL 10 P.M.]

No, this isn't a joke, like Playboy for the Blind.

And it isn't the giant forward step of closed captions for streaming news videos that many frustrated deaf and hearing impaired people like me would like to see on the Web. (For an example of captioned streaming video, click here, but if you're a Republican, you'd better have a sense of humor.)

But captioned radio is a step forward.

You've heard about HD digital radio and maybe how it works. Instead of sending out one analog signal, radio stations send out a bundled signal – both analog and digital. Because the signal is digital, textual data such as traffic, stock information and song titles can be sent out as well. HD digital broadcasts are much less staticky, too, with reduced hiss, pops and fades.

It's the textual data stream that will provide real-time captioning of radio broadcasts on HD digital radio receivers equipped with a display screen to show the captions. A few lines of bright text will scroll up on a dark screen in near sync with the spoken audio, hopefully just a couple of seconds behind. In short, a more or less instant transcript.

So far such sets aren't yet on the market, because existing display screens need too much battery power. But the problem's being worked on, and those in the know say new receivers should be available in a couple of years.

Tomorrow night you can see a demonstration of this technology -- on your computer, not your digital radio -- for National Public Radio says it is going to caption its digital election returns broadcast and demonstrate it on the Web.

I haven't yet been able to pin down the exact URL, but with luck the NPR web site will have a link to that on its home page. According to this press release, so will the web site of the Harris Corp., a communications company. [Later Monday: The Harris Corp. PR guy says the home pages of both sites will carry links to the broadcast tomorrow night, presumably when the broadcast goes live. And the NPR PR rep says it'll be on air from 8 pm to 11 pm EST.]

NPR will also broadcast the captioned HD signal to four of its stations (Washington, Denver, Boston, Baltimore), where special receivers will show the captions to private audiences (of local deaf people, I presume).

Let's hope it all works on the Web. Otherwise I'll just watch Election Night on Fox News merely to enjoy the anchors' long faces.

[I don't know how the demonstration worked for others, but it didn't work for me. Not for half an hour did I discover that the scheme was PC-only, sorry Mac owners; thanks, NPR and Harris, for not letting us know. I did use the Windows XP side of my MacBook and got the captions with Windows Media Player, but they were slow and terribly disjointed, as if only half the lines of text made it through. Of course this was an early-days demonstration, but . . .]

Obama won? I want to see for myself

All the important pundits are declaring that Obama won last night's debate, that he seemed presidential while McCain was just pugnacious.

Okay, but I'd really like to see for myself. I'd like to see the actual combat and make up my own mind instead of having it made up for me.

We don't have television up here at the Writer's Lair in the wilderness of upper Michigan. Oh, other folks have TV, but we don't. We depend on NPR (which, of course, I can't hear) and the Internet for our news.

Besides, we arose so early yesterday morning for the 8-hour drive up from Evanston that we were wiped out and went to bed by the time the debate began.

So this morning I went looking for streaming video of the debate. There's lots of it.

But none of it is captioned for the deaf and hard of hearing.

This is bizarre. All television news is captioned -- it's the law. At least in that venue those who cannot hear are not treated as second-class citizens, minorities to be ignored.

But the sun of enlightenment has yet to shine on Web news organizations. Not one single Web news outlet captions its streaming video. Not PBS, not the New York Times, not Fox, not Salon, Slate or Huffington Post. Not even the Chicago Sun-Times, where I used to work.

Over the last several months I've written to them all, suggesting that they think about proactively captioning their news streaming video before Congress makes it the law. Captioning -- either closed or open -- is not expensive. Doing so now would score a news outlet brownie points for good citizenship.

I have received NOT ONE REPLY, except for a one-sentence response from the Chicago Tribune: "We're working on it."

Pardon me, but bullshit. That's just a contemptuous blowoff.

And so I just have to trust the pundits. Obama won, didn't he? Didn't he?

How do you pronounce 'sweet revenge'?

"How do you say 'Vladimir Nabokov'?" I once asked a professor of Russian literature, who wrote for my book section at the Chicago Sun-Times. (Deaf people, you know, tend to butcher unfamiliar pronunciations. We need all the help we can get if we are not to appear a couple of sandwiches short of a picnic.)

"Na-BO-koff," she said. "The accent's on the second syllable, just like Rudolf Nu-REY-off. And that's "Vla-DEE-mir, not VLAD-i-mir."

Some time later I was chatting with friends, Wellesley- and Cornell-educated, when the subject of Nabokov's novels came up.

"Na-BO-koff," I said.

They snorted. "It's 'NAB-o-koff,'" they said, patting my head figuratively.

"I understand from a Russian lit expert it's 'Na-BO-koff,'" I said defensively.

"Henry, everyone knows it's 'NAB-o-koff.' Nobody will know who you're talking about."

I was outnumbered, but I know how to carry a smoldering grudge, and there are plenty of them in my mental backpack after six decades of patronization from hearing folks. Now, years later, I have my revenge in black and white from, of all places, a web site for the blind.

It's "Say How: A Pronunciation Guide to Names of Public Figures," a page on the site of the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped, part of the Library of Congress. (Can't get more authoritative than that, can you?)

And yes, there it is:

"Nabokov, Vladimir (vlä-DĒ-mir nä-BO-kôf)"

Vindication!

(With belated thanks to Shelf Awareness for the tip.)

Eh?

One of the unexpected consequences of aging, I have long thought, is diminishing lipreading skills. In the last few years I've had a little more difficulty understanding other people. It's taking longer to get used to the speech patterns of strangers. Possibly my intellect is not quite as nimble as it used to be -- I once was crackerjack at guessing what people would say if I knew the context, the subject of conversation. And my vision isn't what it used to be, either.

Until my recent hospital stay, I hadn't credited one other cause of this phenomenon: rapidly growing ethnic diversity in the United States.

There I would be, lying flat on my back, as Indian, Sri Lankan, Jamaican, Spanish, Arabic, Filipino, Russian and Central European doctors, nurses and technicians poked at me while speaking in puzzling accents and syntaxes. (My surgeon is Bosnian, from Sarajevo, but speaks excellent English and with such sweeping facial expressiveness he is easy to lipread.)

This wide range should not have surprised me, for medicine attracts immigrants from everywhere, and Evanston Hospital is a teaching institution affiliated with Northwestern University Medical School.

Still, for an old guy who grew up in the 1950s in a place where everyone spoke Midwestern white-bread farm-boy English, understanding new kinds of folks always has been a challenge. In college it took a while to adjust to my roommates' Bahston accents, and only after years of watching closed-captioned BBC "Masterpiece Theatre" dramas did I get used to British English. Rapid-fire New Yorkese still buffaloes me, and so does Ebonics.

All this notwithstanding, there were only two occasions in the hospital in which I had to resort to paper and pencil. One of them: "Where are you taking me?" I said to the guy with the gurney, who, after much patient struggle, picked up pad and pencil and wrote "X-ray."

One way or another we managed to connect, and that is all that matters.