Cinemark creates nation's first fully accessible theater complexes
Without fanfare -- in fact, with almost no notice -- Cinemark/Century theaters have made that company's two Washington movie multiplexes completely accessible to people with hearing loss. Patrons with hearing loss such that they need captions to understand the dialog have eight different captioned movies to choose from at the Century Federal Way complex in Federal Way, and ten different captioned movies at the Century Olympia complex in that city's Capital Mall.
Cinemark, which operates under the Century brand name in Washington, is using relatively new closed-captioning display devices known as CaptiView. Viewers pick up a portable display unit mounted on a flexible gooseneck that sits in the theater-seat cup-holder. The dialogue and some additional aural information like "door slamming" is transmitted wirelessly, and displayed three lines at a time. A privacy screen minimizes the distraction to other viewers.
The captioning is available for every showing of every movie for which captions have been prepared. At the Federal Way complex, those movies include two brand-new releases, "Green Hornet" and "The Dilemma," and one 3-D movie, "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader." Additional captioned movies at the Federal Way comples are "Little Fockers," "The Fighter," "Black Swan," "Tangled" and "Country Strong." All of those movies are also available with captions at the Olympia complex, which is also showing "True Grit" and "Tron:Legacy" (2-D version) with captions.
Century has converted all of the theaters at both of those complexes to show movies using digital projection, in which film is replaced by digital information. The theaters do not caption the movies -- that is done under contract with the movie studios by a company affiliated with WGBH public television in Boston. The vast majority of major-studio movies are equipped with captions, but prior to digital conversion, very few theaters were equipped to display the captions
CaptiView has some advantages over both open captioning, in which the captions are visible to everyone in the audience and which hearing patrons sometimes claim is distracting, and over Rear Window Captioning, where captions are displayed in mirror image on a reader-board at the back of the theater and viewed to a reflector. Other patrons can't block the captions by standing up at the wrong time. Moreover, a central server can make all of the movies in a multi-screen theater accessible without the need for separate equipment in each individual auditorium.
CaptiView has raised some concerns, though, because using it does require patrons to glance away from the screen while reading the captions. Would that cause eyestrain and discomfort over the course of a full-length movie? No one really knows for certain, because the equipment has not been in wide use -- in fact, it appears that the Washington complexes may be the first in the nation to be equipped to show in captioned form all movies for which captions have been prepared.
Cinemark has been oddly quiet about this accomplishment. It has not advertised the availabilty of captions in its print advertising. Nor is the information readily available on line. If one goes to the general "Fandango" movie-time site, no captioning information is shown. One must either begin at the proprietary Cinemark website, or click on the theater name on the Fandango site to get to the page that mentions the captions. Unfortunately, that arrangement appears to prevent the Captionfish website, which tries to provide a full directory of captioned movies, from getting the information.
By making all captioned movies accessible in captioned form, Cinemark has provided exactly what Wash-CAP asked for in the lawsuit filed in early 2009 against Cinemark and five other defendants. While the case continues against the others, we are hopeful that some or all of those theaters will follow Cinemark's lead, and make their movies accessible to people with hearing loss.
