Karamo Brown: Queer Eye host urges Netflix subtitle change

Source: BBC News:

June 28, 2018 at 19:08

GETTY IMAGES / Host Karamo Brown (left) said he was moved by viewers' complaints about accessibility

Karamo Brown, a host on the hugely successful makeover show Queer Eye, has vowed to pressure streaming service Netflix into improving its subtitles for deaf and hard-of-hearing watchers after a social media debate over their quality.

Fans of the show took to Twitter to complain about the service misrepresenting, censoring and simplifying dialogue from a variety of shows.

Mr Brown, the Queer Eye cast member who focuses on culture, said reading fan comments had broken his heart.

Tweets by Rogan Shannon, a deaf Netflix fan, in which he demanded that the service explain why it was not captioning word for word, have been shared thousands of times in recent days.

His tweets claim the subtitles censor profanity and edit dialogue for brevity.

Others accused the service of failing to caption foreign language inserts and correcting distinct dialects into Standard English.

Rogan Shannon — ROGAN SHANNON
Mr Shannon says new Netflix series have "a lot of errors and issues with their captions"

Netflix has not yet responded to a BBC request for comment but after the outpouring of social media complaints said on Twitter that it was looking to fix some of the issues raised.