New Zealand Opera Tries Out Braille Surtitles for ‘Le Comte Ory’

For most English speakers, surtitles are necessary to follow French, German and Italian operas-a solution that has left vision-impaired operagoers limping. The New Zealand Opera may have recently found a solution with braille.

For its recently-started production of Rossini's Le Comte Ory, the NZO tested a technology that sends braille surtitles to a user's braille-reading machine as surtitles are being flashed onstage. To access the text, users visit a webpage, which then sends the lyrics, line by line, to their readers. 

The program, called contexts.live, was developed by the NZO's general director, Brad Cohen, and his colleague Hugh Glasser. Cohen believes it to be a world first, saying: "Blind and low-vision patrons have always been at a disadvantage - they haven't had the same experiences as the rest of the room was having. For us this is a really important step in levelling the playing field, giving them the same experience and same text as the rest of the audience is seeing."

Paul Brown, co-director of Audio Described Aotearoa and the first person to test contexts.live, described it as "life changing." Previously, vision-impaired audience members had to rely on audio descriptions, which often distracted from the music and the performance. He adds: "It's a recognition of braille as the primary literacy method for a group of people, but secondly, it means we are getting the surtitles the whole audience are seeing."

This was particularly important for the NZO's staging of Rossini's Le Comte Ory, whose translation makes us of New Zealand slang. "I know the audience was laughing at the surtitles because they were so idiosyncratic - to know what they were laughing at, you had to have access to the surtitles," said Brown.

The NZO will continue to use contexts.live for the rest of the season's Le Comte Ory performances. Furthermore, Cohen hopes the technology could be used in other areas. "The application of this goes beyond opera," he said. "Not just theatre but TV, film, and other media."