Diff increases accessibility for movies in Year of Giving

Dubai International Film Festival (Diff) has teamed up with Sennheiser to make films more accessible for people with hearing and vision impairments.

Sennheiser will offer its personal assistive hearing and translation tool CinemaConnect to audiences at Diff, between December 6-13. It will also make the tool available at a new, dedicated year-round theatre for independent films dubbed Diff 365@VOX, located in Mall of the Emirates’ cinema nine.

The initiative, with full endorsement from the National Media Council (NMC), arrives in support of the Year of Giving, announced by His Highness Shaikh Khalifa Bin Zayed Al Nahyan, President of the UAE, and the Dubai Disability Strategy 2020.

“This is in line with one of our core beliefs in the importance of providing access to all mediums of content for all our residents across the UAE,” said Mansour Al Mansouri, director general of NMC.

CinemaConnect is a smartphone app compatible with both IOS and Android devices. It offers hearing assistance, audio description and a portable display unit for closed captioning. This can be directly connected to your assistive listening device or headphones.