Let me start this review by being transparent: I am both a software developer and someone that provides consulting to theaters that are looking for open or closed captioning options. While I am not hard of hearing, my wife has been profoundly deaf since birth and I have entered this field in order to try to help make theater more inclusive to her. I have also built my own software to caption theater, but this software focuses on the actual building of the captions, not the running of them, and is not for sale. I use it mainly to provide small theaters with the means to build their own captions. In other words, I would love to recommend GalaPro to theaters that I work with (and can afford the system), as it would make my job easier. Finally, I'd like to say that I did not use the audio description service that is also a part of the GalaPro app.
GalaPro made a big splash at a conference I went to about two years ago that focuses on arts and accessibility. Their goal was to make all of Broadway accessible to the d/Deaf/hard of hearing by mid-2018. Apparently this app takes cues from lighting, sound and even uses a little machine learning that tries to listen to the play or musical and automatically scroll through captions pre-built for the play. Automation is an important feature of GalaPro, they want to be able to provide captions without a human manually running them. I went to a demo of Gala Pro in Chicago and was impressed with how well the captions synced with the actors' performance until I discovered that for the demo they do have someone manually advancing the script.
So I was excited the other week at Harry Potter and the Cursed Child (Lyric Theatre) to finally see (automated) GalaPro in action.
At the Lyric I was directed to the Coat Check when I mentioned wanting to use GalaPro. The first problem: my phone apparently had to connect to the internet first in order to start the process of connection to the captions specific to the Harry Potter performance. I get this, but I've found that wifi/LTE doesn't consistently work in theaters, so if I was someone that wanted to use my phone but couldn't connect to the internet first, I wouldn't know what to do. And neither did the person at Coat Check, apparently: the Lyric had an iPod on hand that was already set up and after we failed to get my phone to connect, she handed me this instead. I didn't mind this, if it worked.
The Lyric did not provide a holder to hold and position this device. I know that an iPod touch barely weighs anything. But just try holding your empty arm up for an hour and you'll see how incredibly ridiculous this is. I understand that every theater has a different seat situation; theater seat styles vary. While GalaPro could put this responsibility on the theater, of course, it still bothers me; I know that GalaPro has a hardware component and the theaters are paying a good bit for the entire system.
I wish that I could say that even though I had to hold this iPod throughout the show the software worked well. About fifteen minutes into the first act of the play, the captions froze completely, and I got a blindingly bright error screen that said something to the effect of "Uh oh! You've lost connection with the Internet!" and a "Continue" button. After fiddling with it for many minutes (hitting the "Continue" button to no effect), I finally gave up. My phone was in Airplane mode as the app requested…why was it telling me that I had lost internet connection?
I could have left my seat and found someone to help troubleshoot the issues I was having, but the attendant in charge was obviously not a GalaPro support team member. This was an expensive evening, and personally I don’t think that I should have to troubleshoot an issue. If I actually needed the captions, I would have missed the entire first hour and a half of the play.
Returning a few hours later to see Part Two of Harry Potter, I finally got my own phone to connect to the app before I entered the theater, and got the captions running. On my more powerful phone, things ran a little more smoothly…I experienced fewer (but the same) error messages and dropouts. I did not find the actual captioning experience to be any better. When it was periodically working, the captions were either far behind the dialogue or often ahead of what was being said. Sometimes there were more than 4 lines of text per screen and you couldn't read them fast enough before the screen advanced. The automation would hiccup and skip a number of slides, rendering the context of the dialogue unintelligible. I checked in on the app periodically throughout the entire 3 hour play, hoping that things would eventually right themselves, but the problems continued through to the very end.
I know from experience that you can have the lines of the play sync with the lines spoken on stage. The goal with providing this access is to give the patron an experience that approximates what a hearing patron would: "effective communication". My fear is that a d/Deaf/HOH patron will excitedly come to a Broadway show and have an experience similar to mine and not want to attend any more theater. They will leave having had to hold their phone in front of their eyes for 2-6 hours straight, and will have endured error prone, confusing, out-of-sync captioning after paying full price for a ticket. They deserve better.
It is difficult to provide support for an app that has to meet the many different needs of every theater space. Some issues you run into would have to be taken up with the individual theater using this app, like the holder situation. I wanted to give them that credit. But I know that this system is being sold to theaters as a "one and done!" solution for captioning and audio description and on top of that, it is an expensive solution that many smaller theaters cannot afford. If it works this poorly in even one theater, there is more work to do before it's “done”.
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Don't recommend it!
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