The NZ Opera is adding braille surtitles to their performances in an effort to be more inclusive of the blind and low vision community.
Surtitles translating the traditional French or Italian dialogue are often projected above the stage, meaning blind and low vision patrons usually miss out.
After feeling the blind and low vision were poorly served by existing technology, NZ Opera decided to add the English surtitles.
The use of surtitles is important for different language performances as they help understand the specific details of where you are in the story and who's saying what, NZ Opera general director Brad Cohen explained.
He told Breakfast the opera is using existing technology that everyone has on their phones.
"It's like opening a web page," not an app, Cohen said.
"But you can also feed it through to a braille reader; if you have one, then you can read the braille with your fingers, silently and not disturbing anyone around you."
The programme called context.live was developed by Cohen and colleague Hugh Glaser. It sends the opera's surtitles to patrons' braille-reading machines.
Cohen explained there are two streams that normally happen within the shows.
"There's what we call audio description, and that's when someone is actually describing what is happening on stage, and then there's the surtitles, which show the actual specific text, and those two can exist side by side in our technology."
"So, you can have some describing when no one is singing, and you can have surtitles when someone is singing. They work really well together."
NZ Opera is offering the technology for all of its performances of Rossin's comic opera, Le comte Ory, this month.
The braille surtitles were trialled during the Auckland season of Le comte Ory, and testers were said to be finally experiencing the laughs and comical lines at the same time as the rest of the audience.
Cohen said there is more in the pipeline in terms of content and new tech. He said he sees NZ Opera being like a lab for exploring how to connect with its community.
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