Charity StageText has developed CaptionCue to make live performances more accessible to the nation's 10 million deaf, deafened and hard of hearing people.
The new technology which uses captioning and live subtitles was put to the test by 166 audience members at the National Theatre's Temporary Theatre in February this year, and the analysis of the results are the subject of a recent report.
The report shows that the test events not only demonstrated that automatic caption cueing is possible but they also contradicted the assumption that captioning is a distraction.
The outcome of the test events could prove significant for venues and caption users since CaptionCue will reduce the costs of captioning thereby potentially increasing the number and range of shows that are captioned.
Audience members with age-related hearing loss, increasing in number as the ageing population grows, will particularly benefit from this new technology as they are unlikely to have learnt British Sign Language, used for signed performances.
In the future, audience members more generally could potentially enjoy the benefits of CaptionCue if the technology can be developed for use with performances of non-English texts.