Caption with Intention could transform the viewing experience for deaf audiences
FCB Chicago
For movie aficionados out there, who have spent this past summer enjoying blockbusters like the latest Superman flick, Jurassic World Rebirth and Marvel’s Thunderbolts – take a brief moment to reflect on what makes these experiences magical and immersive.
Imagine watching movies without knowing which character is speaking, what tone and how much emotion they are using, as well as the speed and cadence of their speech. What you would be envisaging is the precise movie-watching experience for around 430 million people worldwide who live with disabling hearing loss and rely on traditional closed captions to watch movies and shows.
That’s because today’s closed captioning system for deaf-accessible subtitling, which dates back to 1971 and has barely changed since this time, doesn’t convey any of these key elements. Instead, deaf viewers see unsynchronized plain white text on a black background and it is left to their imagination to infer those rich and nuanced character tomes essential for storytelling that hearing audiences take for granted.
A desire for change
Six years in the making, this is where Caption with Intention comes in – a joint initiative between the Chicago office of the global creative marketing powerhouse FCB, the Chicago Hearing Society and LA-based film production outfit Rakish Entertainment. At its core, Caption with Intention is a novel captioning design system which aims to significantly augment several critical points of failure within traditional captioning by overlaying animation, color and variable typography to bring the text to life.
Firstly, the technology addresses speaker attribution through the color coding of captions and is particularly useful for scenes when multiple people are speaking through swift exchanges. As well as distinct colors, different hues are assigned to characters depending on whether they are main, supporting or minor in status. Effective speech synchronization is addressed by displaying read-ahead white text, which changes to a character-assigned color precisely as each word is spoken.
To convey alterations in tone, volume and emotion, a variable typeface is deployed, showing louder voices in a larger font and whispers in smaller text as well as different display options for pitch, non-speech sounds and music.
Caption with Intention has been a project in the pipeline since 2019 under the watchful eye of Bruno Mazzotti, an Executive Creative Director at FCB Chicago who, having grown up in Brazil with two deaf parents, identifies as a real-life CODA as in the 2022 Oscar-winning film of the same title. However, what has supercharged the project in 2025 and piqued the interest of studios was firstly recognition in April by The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences of the technology as part of a new industry standard in cinematic accessibility. This was formally presented on stage by Marlee Matlin. Hot on the heels, June saw multiple Grand Prix awards at the prestigious Cannes Lions festival, including in the Design Lions, Digital Craft Lions, and the distinguished Titanium Lion.
Community-driven
Karla Giese, who has been deaf since childhood, is a Co-ordinator, Training & Education at the Chicago Hearing Society. She had extensive involvement in the exhaustive user testing undertaken by FCB Chicago to ensure that the final product was up to scratch. This involved trialling multiple iterations of the technology through screenings and interviews with participants. The codesign process teased out some fascinating insights into the deaf movie-watching experience, such as one participant explaining that, until using the technology, he had not realized that Batman and Bruce Wayne have different voices.
“Growing up, I was never a big TV or movie fan because there were no captions available until I got older. And when I got older, and I started to be able to participate, that social aspect was still missing because the captions always lagged,” explains Giese during an interview.
“They weren’t synchronized with what was being said in real time, so everybody else I was watching with would be laughing before I would. There was this social disconnect.”
Danilo Boer, a Global Creative Partner at FCB, also found this process of codesigning with the deaf community to be insightful. “There was a lot of back and forth to get to the perfect design and, to be honest, we initially got a lot of things wrong,” says Boer.
“A lot of the time, we were almost over-indexing and doing more than we needed. We learnt that we needed to be more subtle to prevent the captions from becoming a distraction.”
The immediate future for the open-source project will likely involve a mixture of onboarding more dedicated studio partners to widen adherence and to refine AI automation tools, which will eventually be able to render the dynamic captions precisely and automatically, thereby lessening the need for heavy manual processes. It will also take time for current closed caption decoders to be able to work with the new system. So, for now, the dynamic captions will need to be “burnt into” content in the form of open captions that cannot be switched on and off by the viewer. Boer believes that the technology is now ready for a further wave of real-world iteration.
“We would love to get this out in the world for everyone, even if it’s not perfect yet, he says. “We want to get feedback from millions of viewers, and then we can keep iterating and improving.”
Giese believes that now that the genie is out of the bottle for what film access for the deaf could look like in the modern era, it can’t go back in.
“If we have the community rising up and saying, ‘Hey, we want this, then the industry is more likely to listen and try to meet that need’,” she suggests.
All this goes to show that meaningful intention is not just a key part of the new captions themselves but also what meeds to be an ongoing drive to cement their status as a critical component in the future of accessible film.
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