Hearing Loss Law : Washington Hearing Loss Lawyer & Attorney : John Waldo Law Firm : Hard of Hearing, Disability, Hearing Impairment : Seattle, Bainbridge, Washington, Pacific Northwest

One of our more recent entries announced that the Seattle Mariners would try to accommodate fans with hearing loss by making available portable video-game terminals that would display captions. A Wash-CAP board member tested the system last week, and said it is terrific.

"The device is very good," reports board member Dean Olson. "I was able to read it and then look up at the game. It's useful information -- like when the stories come up to read about the players."

What is being captioned is the Mariners' radio broadcast, which is also fed into the stadium. When the public-address announcer chimes in, that announcement overrides the broadcast, and  when that happens, the captions are of the PA announcer. So the captions convey the same information that is being piped into the stadium for the hearing fans.

The devices may be checked out at the Nintendo kiosk behind home plate. Dean reports that they took a credit card and charged $300 as collateral, but when he turned the device in after the game, they gave him the slip to tear up.

The Washington hearing-loss community will have a chance to check out those devices en masse on July 10. The Puget Sound Chapter of the Association of Late Deafened Adults (ALDA) and the Seattle Hearing, Speech and Deafness Center (HSDC) are promoting a night at the ballpark. There will be a section cordoned off for us, so we can sit together, say hi to our friends, and enjoy a summer night at the ball game. (The opponent will be the Texas Rangers).

The Mariners will set up a special button on the "special group" area of  the team website for us to order tickets, and the tickets won't be limited to hearing-loss folks -- we can all bring our friends and families. Let's have a big turnout to support the Mariners and their efforts to support us.

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Seattle's vibrant drama scene continues to become more accessible to people with hearing loss, as both the Intiman Theatre and the Seattle Repertory Theatre take concrete steps towards offering captioned performances and Paramount Theatre releases its full schedule of captioned shows in 2009.

Following our written requests for captioned performances, I had a very productive meeting earlier this week with Intiman's incoming and outgoing Board presidents and two of its key staff members. Intiman is receptive to the idea of captioning one performance of each of its annual productions, and is currently seeking financial support from the Theatre Development Fund of New York to make that possible. (One of TDF's missions is to enhance accessibility of live theater).

Seattle Repertory Theatre is in the same situation. It plans to start offering captioned performances beginning this fall, and it is looking for funding as well, also from TDF.

I suggested to the Intiman managers that rather than everyone making separate applications for a finite pot of money, the theaters apply jointly for a grant that would support captioning for both. I also suggested they consider forming a consortium to buy the equipment and recruit and train a captioner -- an approach that theaters in England have used to make theater captioning far more common there than here. (We had also raised this possibility with TDF itself, and the feedback we got was that Seattle might be an attractive place to try out this joint approach).

In the interim, Intiman is going to reserve scripts and penlights that will be available on request beginning this Friday, April 24.

Meanwhile, Seattle's largest theater, the Paramount, has released its schedule of captioned performances for 2009. "Frost/Nixon" will be captioned on May 10, "Rent" on June 21, "Wicked" on September 27, "August: Osage County" on November 1 and "Fiddler on the Roof" on November 29.  Tickets for the captioned performances will be available on line.

The Washington State Communication Access Project (Wash-CAP), a non-profit membership corporation dedicted to making Washington's public places accessible to people with hearing loss, began working with (or on, depending on your point of view), Seattle's live theaters a year ago to make their offerings available to us through captioning. At Wash-CAP's behest, the Paramount began captioning last August, and has now offered captioned performances of six Broadway musicals. Seattle's other large theater, Fifth Avenue, will begin presenting captioned performances in the fall of 2009, and we are working now to expand the use of captioning into some of our smaller venues.

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The Seattle Mariners and Nintendo, the Mariners' principal owner, are teaming up to make this season's games more accessible to fans with hearing loss. Their method -- a video gaming device.

Nintendo and the Mariners have been working for a couple of years on the Nintendo Fan Network, which allows someone to bring a portable Nintendo gaming console to the game, then use it during the game to access a number of interactive features. To promote use of the network and the purchase of the gaming devices, the Mariners are going to be loaning 150 of the devices to fans on a first-come, first-served basis, according to a story in this morning's Seattle Times.

After the Washington State Communication Access Project (Wash-CAP) approached the Mariners about captioning the public-address announcements at Safeco Field, the Mariners and Nintendo evidently figured out how to add captioning to its menu of  features accessible via the DSi gaming device. So we can set the device to display captions of those announcements as well as ordering food, checking scores, and all the other things that can be done.

Importantly, the Mariners will reserve some units specifically for the hard of hearing, and those won't be subject to the first-come, first-served rule. 

According to the Seattle Times story, the devices will be available from a kiosk on the main concourse near Section 142.

I get the feeling this is a work in progress, and the story suggests that this is something of an experiment in how best to make in-stadium communication accessible to those with hearing loss. Let's give it a try, thank the Mariners and Nintendo for trying to respond to our needs, and give them the feedback necessary to make the system really work.

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Most of our blog posts have been about the Washington State Communication Access Project (Wash-CAP), and what we are doing to make Washington's public places more accessible to people with hearing loss.

While those efforts are the ones that show up in the news, we are also working to vindicate the legal rights of private individuals related to their hearing losses. Here is a sample of that work:

-- A union electrician needed sign-language interpreters to attend classes required for his continued certification, but the school -- a joint enterprise of contractors and the union -- took the position that the electrician needed to pay for the interpreters himself. We believe that under both Washington state law and federal law, that position is dead wrong, and after the school failed to respond to our letters, we filed suit. The result was an admission of error, an apology, and an amicable resolution of the matter for the future.

-- A woman's Cochlear Implant was failing, her doctor recommended implanting the other ear, but questions remain about whether Medicare will pay for a second implant. We helped find a medical facility that navigated through that maze, and performed the implant.

-- A social worker employed by the state was having difficulty keeping up with her workload, because the ambient noise in her office meant she had to look directly at her clients in order to speech read, and she couldn't do the computer entries at the same time. With our participation in the state's Reasonable Accommodation process, the worker now has a private and quiet office.

-- A health-care worker was forbidden to apply for a job she wanted because management believed her hearing loss would make it impossible for her to do the job. We filed suit on her behalf, and will argue that this kind of paternalism, however innocently intended, is wholly impermissible because if people are not given the chance to fail, they won't have the chance to succeed to their full potential.

-- A client in Texas lost her job as a financial controller when her company down-sized, and has been unable to find replacement work. She had a disability-insurance policy that would pay benefits if she had a disability, was unable to earn her pre-disability income and there was a substantial connection between the disability and the inability to earn. We worked with her on filing a claim for benefits. While we realize that this is a difficult economy, we think the extra handicap imposed by her hearing loss is the sort of connection that warrants an award of insurance benefits. We are cautiously optimistic as we await the decision.

If you have a question about your rights or the rights of a spouse or child with a hearing loss, please get in touch with us for a no-risk, no-obligation evaluation of your situation.  

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Everywhere we turn these days, we see signs that times are getting tough. Jobs and homes are being lost, businesses are failing.

You'd think that would be driving people to drink, but alcohol sales are way down too.

So what are people doing to try to keep their spirits up? Well, according to an article in today's New York Times, they are going to the movies in record numbers.

Not only is total revenue up -- partly a function of higher box-office prices -- but total attendance has taken a sharp jump. If the current trend holds, this year will see the biggest attendance spike in over 20 years.

What accounts for that? According to one academic whose specialty is the entertainment industry, "It's not rocket science. People want to forget their troubles, and they want to be with other people."

This trend could well prove to be an enormous blessing for those of us with hearing loss who have been advocating for greater access through captioning and better sound systems. The exhibitors have been arguing for years that accommodating our needs imposes an "undue" economic burden on them. But with labor and construction costs down, and movie-exhibitor profits up, this looks to be the perfect time for them to act.

We should find out soon whether the exhibitors' resistance to captioning has softened. The Washington State Communication Access Project (Wash-CAP) filed suit earlier this month against the multi-plex theater owners in King County (greater Seattle), asking for meaningful increases in the number and variety of captioned movies.

The defendant exhibitors are trying to arrange a meeting with us in early April to see if we can reach an early resolution. The robust box-office returns should give us another means for arguing that there is not time like the present for them to act.

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In response to an inquiry and request from the Washington State Communication Access Project (Wash-CAP), the audio portion of professional football in Seattle is going to become accessible to fans with hearing losses.

The plan is to provide requesting fans with a hand-held unit that will display in captioned form the announcements from the referees, the public-address announcements, and the audio portion of the in-stadium entertainment, including song lyrics. Because the devices will be portable, we'll be able to use them from any seat, and take them with us to the concourses or the rest rooms. And because they are individual, folks that hear won't have their experience altered by captions on a Jumbotron or reader-board, (and we won't hear the flak from people saying we're ruining their fun). 

The captions will be done in real time by qualified captioners, possibly remote but more likely on site. The specific system they have in mind at Qwest Field in Seattle is used at National Football League stadiums in Denver, Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, so it has a proven track record.

The only real problem I see in this approach is that a good football game can be a "full-body" experience, in which you need both hands for shucking peanuts, holding onto both beer and hot dog, and high-fiving your neighbors when something good happens. I could see potential for the devices getting dropped and broken, lost, and so forth. (Toting them into the rest rooms creates some yuck factors as well). My suggestion was that they find a way to put the devices into a carrying case of some sort, then put straps or bands on the devices so that we can wear them like wristwatches on a forearm, keeping the hands free.

As I said, this is for both of Seattle's professional "football" teams -- the Seahawks, who play American football, and the Sounders, who play what we call soccer and everyone else calls football. (I'm not sure what Europeans call American football, but someone from abroad once observed that it is a game that combines the two worst features of American life -- violence and committee meetings).

Officials anticipate that this system will be up and running by mid-Spring, perhaps in time for the Sounders opener on March 19, and certainly in time for the Seahawks season.

The gentlemen I met with today were Lance Lopes, the General Counsel, and David Young, an assistant general manager. If anyone wants to say "thanks" to these guys, Lopes' address is 12 Seahawks Way, Renton, WA 98056, email LanceL@seahawkssoundersfc.com, and Young's is 800 Occidental Ave. S, Suite 100, Seattle, WA 98134, email davidyo@seahawkssoundersfc.com.

Wash-CAP is dedicated to enriching the lives of people with hearing loss by making communications in Washington's public places understandable. We begin by contacting the facilities, explaining the problem, and asking for their help. Sometimes, that is all it takes, and today was one of those days.

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Some Hollywood type once opined that "there is no such thing as bad publicity." If that's the case, this has been a banner week for Wash-CAP, the Washington State Communication Access Project.

On Tuesday Feb. 17, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer ran what I thought was a very nice story about our movie-captioning lawsuit. The P-I does give readers the opportunity to comment, and boy, did they -- mostly hostile, of course, from people who think lawyers are crooks and laws don't really apply.

A couple of days later, the North Seattle Herald sort of piled on with an editorial opining that our lawsuit wasn't necessary. The editorial was obviously based only on the P-I story -- I doubt the editor had read our complaint, and certainly didn't talk to me or anyone on the Wash-CAP board. I fired off a response -- we'll see if that ever appears in print.

Some really good ink on Saturday, though, from the Kitsap Sun, our county-wide daily newspaper, reporting on our agreement with Washington State Ferries. The really surprising thing was the prominence they gave the story -- the top of Page One! And we even had a rare non-snarky response from somebody who said that captioning announcements on the boats could really help.

We've also been on the radio recently. I did an interview Wednesday on the movie case with Dori Monson of KIRO Radio in Seattle, our local Rush Limbaugh right-wing wannabee, who basically did a lot of hufing and puffing that amounted, in the end, to saying we just should stay home and rent the DVDs, and not appear in public. He was upset, apparently, at the thought that private businesses have to spend money to accommodate folks who, in his view, won't help themselves. I'd like him to spend a few days with any of us to learn how much work we all have to do to stay involved in the world.

I didn't hear it, (radio not being exactly user-friendly to the hard of hearing), but I was told by some friends who did that we got some nice mentions this morning on KOMO Radio, the other Seattle news station, about the WSF lawsuit and its resolution.

It's disheartening sometimes that the initial reaction from many folks is that we should simply go away. Change isn't easy, and unfortunately, too many people think that if we (or any other group) gets something, it must mean that they will get less.

I take some comfort, though, in the realization that acceptance of "the other" has been going on almost since time began. It's interesting, sometimes, to read the ancient laws laid down in Leviticus, for example. In some respects, the laws of 1,200 B.C. aren't that much different than modern law. The difference comes from who the law benefits -- 3,000 years ago, the law benefitted free male adults, while slaves, women and children were treated essentially like cattle.  Progress does come ... not as fast as we'd like, but it does happen.

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The Washington State Communication Access Project (Wash-CAP) and the Washington State Ferries have amicably resolved their lawsuit with an agreement that the ferries will begin to caption their public-address announcements made on board and at their terminals. The agreement is embodied in an order that will be signed by a court, giving it the same effect as if the case had gone to trial, and this was the decision.

Wash-CAP's lawsuit stated that passengers with hearing losses can't understand those announcements. While some are routine and relatively trivial, others are specific and extremely important -- lost items, cars with lights on or horns blaring, and so forth. And while this may come as something of a surprise to those of you who don't often ride the boats, low-priced or free tickets to sporting events and concerts are frequently offered over the PA system, and the race is indeed to the swift.

Under the agreement, WSF will immediately begin a process of collecting information about available captioning systems. Working with user groups such as Wash-CAP, WSF will then issue specifications, ask for bids, purchase a system and install it on its two largest boats, and at its terminals in Seattle and on Bainbridge Island. Following a six-month test, WSF will then either buy and install similar systems for all its boats and terminals, or we'll go back to the drawing board and try something else. (I'll post the agreement next week after the court signs it).

Exact timing is hard to pin down, because the Coast Guard has to improve most vessel installations, and until WSF knows exactly what kind of systems it will use, it can't develop a deployment schedule. The agreed order does require WSF to proceed diligently, and report to Wash-CAP, so we can hold their feet to the fire.

WSF is the nation's largest fleet of passenger ferries, carrying over 26 million passengers per year. With latest statistics indicating that 7.8 percent of the adult population suffers significant hearing losses, this agreement may mean that some 2 million riders per year will be able to understand messages they would otherwise miss.

Now for a good word about lawsuits. We'd corresponded for months with WSF before filing the suit, and couldn't get any specific commitments. Filing a lawsuit ensures two things. First, it ensures that the problem will come to the attention of the people in a bureaucracy or a large corporation that have the power to say "yes" and fix the problem. Second, it creates a time frame in which they must work. So we were able to get this problem resolved in just a little more than six months.

A good word -- lots of them, in fact -- have to be said for the Washington Attorney General's office. Once that office got involved, we stopped arguing about whether WSF had to make its announcements understandable to folks with hearing loss, and started working cooperatively on how it was going to be done. 

Sometimes, lawsuits can make a bad situation worse. But other times, lawsuits can be the quickest and ultimately least expensive way to get a problem resolved. 

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Not unlike the old Western movies where the cavalry shows up at the last minute to save the day, the U..S. Department of Justice made a last-second appearance in the Arizona movie-captioning case, and urged that the truly awful trial court decison be reversed on appeal.

The decision in question, mentioned before on this blog, held that captions change the nature of a movie, and are therefore not required under the Americans with Disabilities Act. That decision effectively made ADA useless with respect to hearing loss by declaring that movie theaters -- and by extension, all other public facilities -- do not need to convert spoken information into a text (or sign-language) format, the only way to make that information accessible to people with more than mild hearing losses.

That case was appealed to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals -- the first movie-captioning case to reach the appeals-court level. Because that case will effectively decide what ADA requires in the way of movie captioning, a number of organizations, including Wash-CAP, filed friend-of-the-court briefs supporting the Arizona Attorney General's office, which brought the case, urging that the decision be reversed.

Last Friday, the United States Department of Justice asked for permission to file its own friend-of-the-court brief. That brief also urges reversal. The DOJ argues that while there was some indication that Congress did not intend the ADA to require open-captioned movies using the technology available in 1990, when ADA was passed, the statute does not address closed-captioning, which might be required. Moreover, DOJ was rather deliberately vague about whether ADA might require open captioning under today's technology, where captions aren't burned into the film's print, but are shown from a separate projector.

DOJ's involvement is highly significant, for two reasons. First, the federal government carefully selects those cases in which it gets involved, and does so sparingly. As a result, the briefs -- always carefully researched and well-reasoned -- are highly influential. More important, the Justice Department is specifically charged with issuing regulations to implement ADA, so its views with regard to a statute that it administers are particularly weighty.

(I don't know who deserves the credit for persuading DOJ to get involved. I spent some time lobbying a mid-level DOJ official at the Hearing Loss Association conference in Reno last June, but I don't pretend that our prompting was sufficient or decisive.)

I had always been reasonably optimistic that the Arizona decision would be reversed, but now, with the involvement of DOJ, I think that reversal is about as close to a certainty as one can get with an appeals court.

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