TV shows "signed"

Er, I'm way biased, but I think it's great. Wish they did that here. (They don't, except during the Star-Spangled Banner during the Super Bowl. Sometimes.)

On the other hand, hard to understand 'em when they're so tiny.

I can understand the frustration as when I watch signed programmes it is distracting BUT there is no reason why deaf people shouldnt enjoy the programmes hearing people watch.

I think it would be good if there was a button on a remote that can be used to display or get rid of the signing .I think this may be the case now.People are able to get a system were subtitles/signing can be optional.

Yep, that'd be good.

You guys were ahead of us with universal closed captioning. I lived in London for a while in 1993, and at the time, in America, you had to have a special captioning decoder box. But you guys had universal cc at the time, just hit a button. I thought it was amazing. Now you see captions here all the time, bars and such especially.

Captions are actually just fine with me, as opposed to signing, but I still think it's cool. Having it optional would be great but I imagine complicated from a technical standpoint.

Decoder, thats the word I was looking for.

Complicated!!Tush and nonsense.If we can put a man on the moon we can make signing on TV optional.

Isn't that what the subtitle button is for?

From what I can gather there are 65000 people in the UK that use sign language out of a population of 60,000,000 thats approx one per cent of one percent, which means that 99.99% of us will have progs made unwatchable to suit the .001% rather than the .001% using their subtitle button.

Theres a subtitle button!!!!

I know material girl, my wife uses it as she's is a bit mutt and jeff, so why do we need a live figure of a person on screen signing which makes the programme impossible to watch?

I love closed captioning. I can watch TV muted and still understand what's going on.

And, not to pick nits or anything, but we can't put a man on the moon. Not right now, at least....

And consider the cost of all those ramps and elevators for folks in wheelchairs. I definitely think that's appropriate... although the rules go a little far from time to time.

Well, I could get into how cheap the vast majority of ADA accommodations are... but I won't.

I thought I posted something here after Material Girl's last response -- I know I typed it anyway, not sure why it's not there. It was just something like:

I have mixed feelings about this one. The problem is that all deaf people are not like me and Don's wife, whose first languages are English. (I'm presuming in the case of Don's wife.) Many deaf people are not particularly fluent in English, so captions do not necessarily provide useful information. Signers on-screen are the only way to provide interpretation in these people's first language. ASL/ BSL has no written component.

That said, I really can see how it would be annoying, and on principle I'm against overreaching accommodations because of the inevitable backlash they carry. I think having a box with a signer is cool, but if it pisses hearing people off enough that they not only don't want that but don't want captions, either, that's bad. I worry about the more basic stuff being eroded (which is happening every day here -- the ADA is being chipped at steadily.)

I definitely think the cost/benefit is there for the ADA accommodations. That was my point.

My complaint has more to do with trying to apply blanket guidelines to all situations, and is a blanket complaint not directed specifically at ADA rules. And I acknowledge that it is a complaint w/o real merit. I just like to complain....