As a hard of hearing child who loved old movies, I owe a great deal to Ted Turner and his creation of Turner Classic Movies (TCM).

Long before accessibility was widely discussed, TCM airing classic films, with captions, opened a whole world to me. While many movie theaters were not accessible then — and too many still are not today — captions on television allowed me to finally follow the dialogue, understand the stories and fall in love with cinema history.

Back then, not every VHS tape was captioned. The captions on TCM were carefully prepared by real people, not rushed AI-generated captions like we often see today. They were accurate, thoughtfully timed and never distracted from the movie itself. For a hard of hearing kid discovering classic films, that mattered.

TCM also showed me films that featured characters with disabilities, which was just as important as the captions. I remember watching films such as “Wait Until Dark,” “A Child Is Waiting” and “The Miracle Worker.”

Films that centered around a character with a disability allow us to connect with that character and understand what they go through, especially when we may not personally know someone with that disability in our own lives. Those stories made me realize how disability on screen can sometimes reflect how people with disabilities are treated in real life.

I thank Ted Turner for making classic movies accessible — and taking us to places we wouldn’t have otherwise gone.

Brendan Williams
Freeport