The Reception of Enriched Subtitles by the Deaf, Hard-of-Hearing and Hearing Audiences in Qatar: Speaker Identification Strategies

In the absence of sound, deaf and hard-of-hearing audiences tend to find it challenging to identify speakers in audiovisual productions. This pilot study follows an empirical, exploratory and a mixed-methods approach to the reception of enriched subtitles by the deaf, hard-of-hearing and hearing audiences in Qatar. The thesis aims to investigate the viewers’ preferred enriched subtitling strategy for speaker identification: the use of colours, name tags, or displacement/speaker- dependent placement. The study assesses the viewers’ comprehension for three variables/situations: bouncing speakers, dialogues, and off-camera/off-screen speakers. These situations represent the circumstances when deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers typically find it most challenging to identify speakers. To achieve these aims, all participants watched a short animated feature Crow: The Legend, which was enriched with different strategies, and pre-test and post-test interviews were conducted. The post-test interview results suggest that while hearing viewers favour the use of colours, their Deaf and hard-of-hearing counterparts prefer the use of displacement for speaker identification. The experiment did not give sufficient data to examine in detail the correlation between the particulars of hearing impairment, reading skills, comprehension scores and enriched subtitling preferences of the Deaf and hard-of-hearing participants. However, the findings illuminate the complex relationship between hearing impairment, education and reception of enriched media.