There was no access ramp at Andy Warhol’s Factory. When popular culture pushes into new territory, it can be slow to lay the groundwork that might allow disabled people to follow. Today, in the flourishing cinematic playground of VOD, fewer regulations mean more films and less censorship, but also a sad reluctance to bring disabled viewers along for the ride. A recent survey found that less than a quarter of the UK’s on-demand platforms offer subtitles, compared with the vast majority of DVD releases.
Some good news comes courtesy of the acclaimed Notes On Blindness, available to stream from Monday on Curzon Home Cinema, Virgin Media and the BFI Player. Not only is the film available with subtitles, but it also comes with a range of different audio tracks specially designed for blind and partially sighted audiences.
In the film, the late academic John Hull describes the physical and psychological sensation of losing his sight at age 45, through a series of archived audio diaries he made along the way. After spells of terror, grief and depression, Hull begins to see his blindness not as a barrier between him and the wider world but as an opportunity to find a vivid new mode of communing with it.
In that spirit, the film’s various audio tracks attempt to ensure that the experience is no less potent for visually impaired audiences. There’s a straightforward audio description track read by Louise Fryer, whose measured monotone stands at some distance from the film, allowing listeners to conjure the missing images for themselves. More evocative is a read of the same words by the actor Stephen Mangan, who invests the material with significantly more emotion than he brought to Postman Pat: The Movie, becoming something like an omnipotent narrator as he weaves in and out of Hull’s recordings.
Most fascinating of all – and something of a radical step forward for film accessibility – is the “enhanced soundtrack version”, which all but disregards the film’s visuals and instead constructs an entirely new version of the film through purely sonic means. Expressionistic sound design is used to create aural reconstructions of key episodes from Hull’s life, while additional excerpts from his diaries fill in any narrative gaps. Notes On Blindness may be just one film, but this exemplary package points towards a more inclusive future for VOD, just as other pop cultural arenas have sought in recent years to better serve their disabled clientele. Pittsburgh’s seven-storey Andy Warhol Museum is wheelchair accessible throughout.
