Amazon Adds Sign Language to Prime Video
Amazon this week published a blog post wherein it detailed accessibility features for Prime Video. Most notable is support for sign language interpretation in American Sign Language (ASL) and British Sign Language (BSL). The post was written by Deb Landau.
“Prime Video now offers sign language interpretation in American Sign Language (ASL) and British Sign Language (BSL) across more than 20 movies and series including Prime Original movies such as Red, White, and Royal Blue and The Idea of You, among others,” she wrote on Thursday. “This viewing option is available globally.”
To find sign language-enhanced titles, Landau notes users can use search, as well as peruse the Accessible Movies & TV collection in the app if you’re in the United States.
Relatedly, Landau highlights Prime Video’s audio descriptions and Dialogue Boost. Moreover, she pointed to Amazon’s page outlining Prime Video’s accessibility features. I say the Prime Video Accessibility Statement is an eminently cogent read and well with your eyeballs’ attention. It’s damn impressive how flexible Amazon built Prime Video to be in terms of how a disabled person can traverse the app, including calling out nerdy coder minutiae such as how the software “leverages operating system and device level APIs to support assistive technologies in ways customers are familiar with.”
Elsewhere in Landau’s post, she details accessibility features in other Amazon products such as Alexa, Fire TV, and Kindle.
One de-facto accessibility I miss dearly in the Prime Video app on tvOS is X-Ray. I recently completed another rewatch of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel—unquestionably, one of my all-time favorite shows—and was dismayed to discover X-Ray had been removed from the app at some point in the past. Like InSight on Apple TV, I love using X-Ray occasionally to remind myself of who’s on screen at a particular moment if I don’t recognize them. It’s more accessible than, say, pausing the show or movie and reaching for my iPhone to open up Callsheet by my friend Casey Liss. Callsheet is a lovely app in isolation; the salient point is only it necessitates taking another few steps, whereas I was always drawn to X-Ray’s immediacy and how it consolidates actions.
From a disability standpoint, it can be more accessible to tap on the Siri Remote and select the InSight button, for instance, than picking up your phone, launching Callsheet, searching for the material, and then finally absorbing the info. The latter exerts significantly more energies for certain people than the former potentially would.
Anyway, as a CODA whose native language is not English but ASL, I’m deeply appreciative of this week’s news from Amazon. I don’t speak ASL very often nowadays, but I haven’t lost my skills as they’re “hardwired” into my being; to that point, it delights me whenever I watch CODA—get it on 4K Blu-ray, if home theater nerdery is your thing—that I don’t have to read the subtitles in order to understand dialogue during scenes with Marlee Matlin and Troy Kotsur, for instance. It keeps me grounded to my roots, never mind the fact my roots have entanglements from which I’ve never quite freed myself, mental health-wise anyway. But hey, I’m bilingual at least!
Zooming out, Prime Video’s support for sign language interpretation marks the continuation of somewhat of a (good) trend in the streamer space. I’ve done quite a bit of reporting on HBO Max, as an example, augmenting its catalog with sign language features. Most recently is my report from last November HBO Max was adding an ASL stream to the service’s popular horror series IT: Welcome to Derry. As a devout sports fan, I’ve also written extensively about the NHL’s “NHL × ASL” initiative, a Sports Emmy winner and produced in partnership with PXP founder and CEO Brice Christianson.
