ReelAbilities Stream, a brand-new service featuring films celebrating the lives and stories of people with disabilities, launched this week during Disability Pride Month.
RELATED NEWS: Your Guide to Disability Pride Month
The brainchild of the ReelAbilities Film Festival, the largest festival in the U.S. dedicated to promoting awareness and appreciation of the lives, stories, and artistic expressions of people with disabilities, the streamer has an emphasis on accessibility.
Where to find it
How much does it cost?
Film shorts are $1.99 and features are $3.99, both for 48 hours.
What’s on it?
There are currently some 50 films — shorts and features — all of which have been shown at the ReelAbilities Film Festival.
What makes it accessible?
All films include captions and audio description, and the site incorporates clear design and navigation. Let’s dig down.
Captions
Film captions are visual on-screen titles intended for people who are deaf or have hearing loss. While subtitles display on-screen titling of the dialogue in the film, captions provide on-screen descriptions of all plot pertinent sounds and audio included in the film (both dialog and non-dialog sound), noting when music is played or a background sound is heard.
Audio description
According to the ReelAbilities website, audio description (also “video description”) refers to an additional narration audio track for people who are blind or have low vision who are consumers of visual media (including television and film, theater, dance, opera, and visual art). It’s an added audio layer on the existing main audio of the film, and consists of a narrator talking through the presentation, describing what is happening on the screen or stage during the natural pauses in the audio, and sometimes during dialogue if deemed necessary.
If a film’s original language is other than English, the audio description will also include the narrator speaking over the character’s original foreign language dialogue with the English translation.
Accessibility Menu widget
On the corner of the screen is an Accessibility Menu widget. Clicking on it, or pressing CTRL+U, will open up the accessibility menu. This menu allows the user to adjust the website to their accessibility needs, including: contrast, highlight links, bigger text, text spacing, pause animation, dyslexia friendly, cursor control, tooltips, line height, and text align.
Image: Freepik
