MIAMI, United States. – On September 19, 2024, Google dedicated its doodle* Cuban-American silent film actor Emerson Romero, a pioneer in film accessibility for people with hearing disabilities.
Born in HavanaOn August 19, 1900, Romero moved to the United States with his family at the early age of seven, having lost his hearing due to whooping cough. From that point on, he dedicated himself to a greater cause: making cinema accessible to deaf people. According to Google, “Romero is credited with some of the first techniques for making films” “accessible to the hearing impaired.”
Romero began his artistic career on the Island, where his brother founded a film company in 1924. Although he initially worked behind the scenes, he soon began starring in films, standing out for his performance in A Yankee in Havana. His talent caught the attention of executives Hollywoodwhich led him to move to California, where he would act in more than 20 short films, such as Great Guns and The Cat’s Meow.
Despite its initial success, the arrival of sound films in 1927 marked a significant barrier for deaf actors, as studios stopped including subtitles and eliminated intercut titles, making it difficult for people with hearing impairments to enjoy films.
Faced with this exclusion, Romero did not sit back. He became an activist within the deaf community and, together with friends, founded the Theatre Guild of the Deaf in New Yorka company that staged numerous works, many of which Romero directed and acted in.
However, his greatest legacy came in 1947, when he developed the first subtitles for a sound film by cutting up strips of film and inserting images with subtitles between the frames. This allowed deaf people to enjoy cinema in a way that was not possible before.
“This innovative technique inspired those who later created advanced subtitling methods,” Google said at his tributeAlthough rudimentary, Romero’s effort laid the groundwork for modern subtitling systems that are widely used in the film industry today.
He doodle dedicated to Romero was illustrated by another Cuban-American artist ― Derek Abella―, who depicted the actor manipulating a film with subtitles, a symbol of his fight for accessibility in cinema.
In addition to his pioneering work in subtitling, Romero contributed to the creation of products for deaf people, such as the Vibralarm vibrating alarm, designed to alert the hearing impaired through vibrations rather than sound.
*The doodles (in English “spontaneous drawings”) are artistic variations of the Google logo used by the company on special occasions or to celebrate events, people or holidays.
