"There's no reason why people that are hearing-impaired should be kept from enjoying the talents developers put on display as much as anyone else."

I'd like to invite you to step into my shoes, for just a moment. As you're there, close your eyes and try to listen to the world around you. Depending on where you're standing, you'll hear things that don't give away their location by sound alone. Maybe you'll hear some traffic speeding by, but you couldn't make out what direction they were coming or going in. You could hear some indistinct noises that mean nothing and everything all at once. You might hear that people are talking to each other around you, but couldn't make out a word they're saying. This is where I am – neither here nor there.

Please forgive the dramatic entrance. The problem afflicting me and millions of other people is not something unique or rare. I'm hearing-impaired. Hard of hearing, if you like. This is not to be confused with deafness, however. Deafness implies the inability to hear anything at all, and that does not apply to me. I can hear most sound. If you had a conversation with me, I could probably hear you just fine. But I've been around long enough to realize that the ability to hear does not equal the ability to understand or comprehend what you are hearing. Those that have spoken with me several or more times come to find something a little different from their usual conversations. I frequently must ask people to repeat themselves in order for me to understand them. It's not as if I am being rude and not listening to them, but rather, exactly the opposite. I struggle to listen to them, when listening and comprehending me and others comes so easily to them.

That's a personal problem, and it's one that I have to deal with on a case-by-case basis. It's certainly of no real concern to the average person reading this article. However, this problem sincerely affects me in ways that I feel that it should not. I'm an avid video gamer, as you could probably figure by the fact that this article is posted on Kombo. I have been playing video games since I was a very, very young child, and seeing as I am in my twenties, that puts me right back to the golden age of the NES, the Atari 2600 and the like. Those of you who can remember back that far can recall that this is so far before the modern games that exist today that instead of voice acting and the like, dialogue was expressed through text on the screen. The only thing some hearing-impaired and deaf people missed out on was the music and sound effects, which were almost never prerequisites for playing a video game. It became a hobby that a lot of people with this problem were able to enjoy, because we never felt that we were necessarily being "cheated" out of the experience of the storyline when movies and television programming did not have closed-captioning or a comparable service.


Mass Effect is a good example of a game that caters to the hearing impaired
Sometime during the 1990's and beyond, when the CD was introduced as the primary medium for storing games, people came to realize that instead of text on a screen being the sole method for expressing the storyline or dialogue between characters, the space existed to record actors actually speaking the lines of dialogue, much as people did in movies and television. There is no doubt that these was a major revolution in how video games were and still are made to this day. It's one that I personally do enjoy. Characters speaking add so much to the overall experience and production values of a video game, that it's near-unfathomable to consider a full-blown retail title today that would not have it. Unfortunately, it seems that with the introduction of voice acting, the familiarity of the subtitle has worn off on some publishers.

The vast majority of games that I have played in the last few years do include subtitles for the hearing-impaired and deaf (people with full hearing can use them as well, believe it or not). Titles like Uncharted, Gears of War, Metal Gear Solid, Final Fantasy XII and countless others all offer the option for the end user to turn the subtitles on or off as per their desire. Some games like Half-Life 2 take this a step further and actually include closed-captioning for the dialogue and the sound effects. But it sometimes feels that for every game that does include subtitles, there's a Resident Evil 4 or a Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter that does not include subtitles to go along with their voice acting. It's frustrating to realize that despite the fact that developers have come so far in their ability to express their stories and experiences, they often forget that not everyone will be able to enjoy them because of something so minor being overlooked. Even still, it sometimes makes playing the game impossible for me because I couldn't hear the instructions for the mission or event, and no summary is available.

It isn't just video games that are forgetting this small thing, though. With the mad rush to deliver television shows and content to customers online on demand (a new market in which consoles play a large part), it seems that the content providers have neglected to include something that they've already done the work on. If you purchase or rent a movie from Apple iTunes, a small handful of movies include closed-captioning that can be turned on or off while you're watching the movie on your computer, Apple TV, or even on the newer iPod models. The vast majority of movies on the store do not. Microsoft's Xbox Live Marketplace includes a lot of movies and television programming as well, but none of them have captioning or subtitles of any kind, and their lack of doing so actually feels cruel, in some respects. Where on Apple services and devices, an indication is available right away if a movie has subtitles or not, on the Xbox Live Marketplace, you have to actually click on the movie and go to the purchase screen option to discover if it has subtitles, and it nearly seems like a humiliating joke, because I have yet to identify any content on the store that actually has subtitles at all.

In addition to games, I also really enjoy movies a great deal. In my home, I have over a hundred movie titles on DVD and Blu-ray Disc (even a very small handful on UMD). However, there are still movies that I want to view through (legal!) downloads since they're in high-definition and offer an added level of convenience. Maybe they are smaller-release titles that might not be available at a rental store or any retailers that sell movies near me. As much as I'd like to rent these movies-for-download, far more often than not, I can't because almost none of the downloadable movies come with subtitles. While I'll admit to enjoying Blu-ray Disc a great deal because of the quality it provides, I'd also like to point out that every Blu-ray and DVD title I own has subtitles on it. Even the UMDs I own have subtitles on them, and usually in multiple languages at that. It seems shameful that almost all of the movies and television programs that I've viewed through iTunes, Xbox Live Marketplace, Amazon, NetFlix on Demand, Hulu, and all the other online, digital distribution methods out there claim to be the evolution of how society will watch video in the future, and yet none of them can deliver something as basic as subtitles and closed-captioning.

Being able to have voice acting in the video games we play is truly a wonderful thing. They've managed to flesh out games in ways and methods that we only dreamed of twenty and thirty years ago. Digital distribution is, no doubt, the method of the future of television and movie viewing. And yet, with all of these advances, it feels as if hearing-impaired and deaf people are slowly being cheated out of something that we waited so long for, in the form of subtitles and closed-captioning. One giant leap forward and two steps back, even. Innovation is vital to this industry; all I ask is that developers do not forget the small-but-critical details in their pursuit of the next big thing. There's no reason why people that are hearing-impaired should be kept from enjoying the talents developers put on display as much as anyone else