46 THE OTT FILES Subtitling
Words by Neal Romanek
Two Danish high school students built an app which has opened up a whole new viewing experience for people with a surprisingly common disability
lexander Graham Bell was one of the founders in the field of communications technology. The path that led to his invention
of the telephone began with Bell’s work at schools for the deaf (in fact, one of his early patients was the great Helen Keller). In the 21st century, Bell’s near namesake Alexander Gram Jensen has added his own link to the chain of media innovation, also sparked by a desire to help those with disabilities. The SubReader project began when Jensen and his co-founder, Anders Bredgaard Thuesen, were in secondary school (which was only two years ago) at Learnmark Horsens school in Denmark, about an hour’s drive south of Aarhus. “The idea for SubReader came from my little brother, who is dyslexic. He can’t read,” Jensen explains. “We’ve always watched a lot of movies and TV at home. But as he grew up and reached the age of about ten, he wanted to watch television action movies or comedies, and in Denmark these are largely foreign language films with subtitles. “Since he couldn’t read, it forced my mother to watch along and read the
ENCOURAGING INCLUSIVITY With up to 10% of people suffering from some form of dyslexia, SubReader has wide appeal, particularly in subtitle-heavy countries
subtitles for him, with everyone else in the room. Watching The Lord of the Rings for three hours with your mum translating the whole movie is not the best experience. And that eventually led to my family not really watching movies together on Friday nights, and instead diversifying out to individual activities. And I thought that was a shame because we liked watching movies together.” Jensen thought the solution would
be to have a service that read subtitles aloud. He found to his surprise that no such services existed. Then along came a school assignment in which Jensen and his fellow students were tasked with developing an entrepreneurial company idea which focused on technology. The resulting projects were entered in competitions, including the Europe-wide 2016 JA Company of the Year Competition, for the most outstanding student
feedzine feed.zine feedmagazine.tv
Powered by FlippingBook