Arizona Court Turns Off Movie Captioning
A federal judge in Arizona has just come out with an absolutely awful decision about movie captioning. The case was brought by the Arizona attorney general's office, which asked that movie exhibitors provide captioning to make movies accessible to people with little or no hearing, and narrative descriptions to make movies accessible to people with little or no vision.
The court ruled that the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) requires neither captioning nor narrative descriptions. Worse than the result was the reasoning. The opinion states that converting dialog into captions or visual material into narrative would fundamentally alter the nature of movies.
Since the ADA does not require public facilities to fundamentally alter the nature of their services, this ruling would mean that far from needing to expand their offerings of captioned movies, theaters may in fact eliminate the limited offerings of captions they currently provide.
Because of the important place that movies occupy in our culture, expanding the availability of either open-captioned movies (where captions are visible from throughout the theater) or close-captioned movies (where captions are displayed only to patrons requesting them) has been a fundamental goal of the hearing-loss community.
The ADA itself has been interpreted as not requiring that all movies be open-captioned. Nevertheless, persuasion and litigation has produced mixed results -- limited availability of both open- and closed-captioned movies at a few theaters in a few locations. The trend in Washington, where litigation has been contemplated but not filed, has been positive but frustratingly slow. A few theaters offer close-captioned showings of selected films, while other theaters offer intermittent open-captioned showings of selected films. Similarly, a few theaters are offering narrated descriptions of selected films.
The Arizona decision is a giant step backwards. By declaring the conversion off aural material into text (or vice versa) to be a fundamental alteration and not required under ADA, the court is saying that no matter how easily or inexpensive that conversion might be, it is never required under federal law. Worse yet, nothing in the opinion is limited to movies -- the reasoning would also rule out captioning of live-theater presentations, lectures and so forth. We might be entitled to devices that will amplify the sound, but not to anything else.
The decision is being appealed to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which includes Washington, meaning that the rule of law that comes out of the case will apply here. A number of national advocacy organizations that represent the interests of both hearing-loss and vision-loss constituencies are planning to file legal briefs urging that the decision be overturned. Wash-CAP is considering filing a brief pointing out the impact this decision could have in the State of Washington.
Courts make bad decisions every day that we figure out how to live with. Once in a while, though, courts make decisions that are so unbelievably bad that you shake your head and say, "How could this happen?" This is one of those cases. This is also why we have appeals courts. Nothing is ever certain in the legal world, but this decision is so far off base that I have a relatively high degree of confidence that it will be overturned on appeal.
