Nearly 77 years after the 1938 premiere of Little Miss Broadway, Sara Johnston finally understood why Shirley Temple appeals to audiences of all ages. Sara, a long-time Greenbelt resident, is deaf, and going to the movies wasn’t always easy. When the Old Greenbelt Theatre reopened in May 2015, Sara attended the official premiere, a captioned screening of Little Miss Broadway. The famous movie star gained a new fan now that Sara could read the upbeat song lyrics and Shirley’s optimistic dialogue. Most viewers are familiar with subtitles, the technology used for foreign films or foreign-language speech in English-language films; for example, the thriller Our Kind of Traitor subtitled several minutes of key Russian dialogue. Captions go further because they present in a readable format for viewers who are deaf or hardof-hearing all significant audio content, such as spoken dialogue, the identity of speakers and descriptions of significant sound effects and music. Before the reopening, Caitlin McGrath, the executive director of the Old Greenbelt Theatre, attended the Sunday morning Deaf Brunch at the New Deal Café to learn from moviegoers what types of assistive technologies would best serve them. Later McGrath met with the deaf community and the City of Greenbelt to discuss the best option for adaptive and assistive technologies, which the City of Greenbelt funded as part of the Old Greenbelt Theatre renovations. As a result of this input, the theater offers several assistive technologies. On Sunday mornings, the regular feature film is almost always presented with open captions that all viewers are able to see on the screen.
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