Regal Makes Seattle America's Most Accessible Movie City
Regal Cinemas, America's largest movie-theater chain, has made its first-run movie theaters fully accessible to people with hearing loss. Regal has equipped all auditoriums at its eight first-run King County multiplexes with the equipment necessary to show closed-captioned movies, and is now showing every movie for which captions have been prepared in captioned form.
By doing so, Regal has made Seattle America's most accessible city for movie-goers with a hearing loss such that they cannot understand the movie soundtracks even with the volume-enhancing assistive-listening devices that the theaters provide.
Unlike open captions, where the captions are superimposed on the movie print and visible to the entire audience, closed captions require patrons wanting the captions to pick up and use an individual viewing device provided by the theater.
Regal is experimenting with eyewear, special glasses that display the captions, which are sent to the glasses wirelessly. Wash-CAP members who have used the glasses have been very favorably impressed. They report that the viewer can match the depth of the captions to the viewer's place in the auditorium -- close, far or medium -- and at least for some movies can select a language other than English.
The glasses would seem to provide most of the advantages of open captioning, but because the captions do not alter the movie-going experience of other patrons, the captions are available for all showings. Regal had offered open-captioned movies in one auditorium at four of its King County multiplexes, but would only activate the captions for certain showings, which were generally at off-peak times. True, it's a minor hassle to pick up and return the glasses, and they are not fashion statements, but it's no bigger hassle than our hearing aids and CIs, which also open the world of sound to us.
Regal is taking the same approach to movie accessibility as Cinemark, the nation's third largest chain. Both have completed converting their King County theaters to digital projection, and after so doing, have provided full captioning capability. In so doing, those theaters have done everything Wash-CAP asked in a suit we filed in 2009 in King County Superior Court.
Regal and Cinemark have both stated publicly that they intend to make all of their first-run theaters across the country capable of showing captioned films. Cinemark has so equipped its only other Washington multiplex. Regal has not fully equipped its Washington theaters outside of King County, nor, to our knowledge, has it fully equipped many (if any) of its theaters outside of Washington, but we expect those companies will do so in the relatively near future.
While Regal and Cinemark have done what they can, that does not mean, unfortunately, that we can see every movie being shown at their theaters. For reasons we cannot understand, some studios still are not captioning all of their movies, even though the cost to do so runs as little as $2,000. Nor are 3-D movies captioned, even though the 2-D versions of the same movie may be. So the challenge now will be to persuade those reluctant studios to provide captions, especially with the likely proliferation of theaters equipped to use them.
Unfortunately, not every theater chain is following the lead of Regal and Cinemark. AMC theaters, America's second-largest chain, continues to take the position that it will equip some but not all of its theaters to show captions. We are currently in the process of addressing that question in our Seattle lawsuit, and would hope for a favorable ruling, a change in AMC's corporate position, or perhaps both.
We've waited a long time for our dream of meaningful access to movies to become a reality, but at least for Seattle audiences, it appears that the dream has come true.
