TIFF needs to start requiring captions for all films: advocates

The Toronto International Film Festival is one of the most prestigious events on the city's cultural calendar, but according to one critic, accessibility issues prevent it from being something every movie lover can fully enjoy. 

Michael McNeely has been attending the festival since 2010 and is an accredited critic who reviews films for Accessible Media Inc. McNeely is deaf-blind but can read large text, meaning he needs captions to do his favourite thing: watch movies. 

TIFF runs from Sept. 5 to 15, but when McNeely went to buy tickets for this year's festival in late August, he says there was no information about which English-language films would have captioning. He received an initial list from TIFF, but it doesn't include some of the festival's highest profile entries, like The Godfather director Francis Ford Coppola's Megalopolis or the Saturday Night Live biopic Saturday Night. 

"I don't understand why we're still having this conversation," said McNeely, who first spoke to CBC Toronto about accessibility issues at TIFF in 2016. 

"It's frustrating to me. It's frustrating that people with disabilities are being ignored and being relegated to the side."

Some high-profile entries like Nightbitch, starring Amy Adams, and Conclave, from Oscar-winning director Edward Berger, will be available with captioning. But McNeely wants to see captions become a prerequisite for a film being admitted into the festival. 

He also wants to be able to know if a movie will have captions when he buys the ticket, instead of having to wait to hear from TIFF.

"I can get refunded later for any movie that is not captioned. But that still is not giving me the dignity of being treated as a customer making an informed decision of what is available to me," he said. 

TIFF did not provide CBC Toronto with a response to McNeely's concerns. 

Captioning should be prerequisite for TIFF: advocate

Steen Starr, a consultant and advocate for accessibility at film festivals, said while festivals should try to provide as much accessible content as they can, the onus of actually captioning films rests with the people and companies who make them. 

Still, Starr said a festival like TIFF could play a significant role in getting films captioned by making it a requirement. 

"I think once a major film festival like TIFF takes a role like that, that's going to start, potentially, a sort of movement towards it at other major festivals," she said. 

David Lepofsky, chair of the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act Alliance, said with modern technology it's easier than ever for a film to have captions. And TIFF has the prestige to mandate them, he said.

"It's not the Toronto International Film Festival for people without disabilities. It's a Toronto International Film Festival for everyone," he said.

This year, for films being shown at the TIFF Lightbox (one of several venues for screenings during the festival) there are new captioning devices available for those who need them.

Captioning devices allow individual viewers to see captions at their seat, instead of everybody seeing them on the screen. With TIFF viewers being no strangers to on-screen text — foreign-language films, of which there are many, screen with subtitles — McNeely wants every English-language film to have captions on-screen. 

"[The devices] make disability a private experience, meaning that if I had any problems with the machine, I'm the only one that has problems with the machine," he said.

If everyone can see the captions and they stop working, everyone will know there's an issue, he said. 

Despite being the film lover that he is, McNeely's experiences with TIFF make him hesitant to travel to another festival around the world. 

"TIFF is supposed to have been a leader of film festivals," he said. "If it is the leader, then that means other film festivals are probably falling behind."