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

In a significant expansion of movie access, the Landmark and AMC theater chains have agreed to add closed-captioning capacity to most if not all of their theaters in conjunction with their conversion to digital projection.

Landmark's commitment came in a personal meeting last week with Ted Mundorff, the chain's Chief Executive Officer. Mundorff said that the cost-sharing formula that the movie studios have offered to the major theater chains like Regal and AMC does not work with Landmark's emphasis on independent and art films, which means that digital conversion may take longer and may not include all of Landmark's theaters. He said that Landmark anticipates having its digital conversion plans finalized by the middle of 2012, and that when conversions are undertaken, Landmark will add closed-captioning capabilities. Closed captioning displays the captions on individual viewing devices, thereby not altering the movie-going experience of other patrons.

Although Landmark operates far fewer theaters than Regal, AMC or Cinemark, its commitment to captioning may in some respects be more significant than the commitments of those larger chains. Landmark theaters focus on showing movies that appeal to an adult audience in the best sense of the word, and that audience includes the older population groups that have the greatest prevalence of hearing loss. Thankfully, Mundorff agreed that making films accessible to people with hearing loss may benefit Landmark significantly more than it would benefit the typical suburban multiplexes that cater more to younger movie-goers.

Landmark plans to use Sony projector/servers in those theaters that it converts to digital projection. It will experiment with caption-display devices. It has installed the CaptiView modules at its theaters in Los Angeles and Baltimore, but is having some difficulty working the bugs out of the equipment that supposedly makes CaptiView compatible with Sony servers. Mundorff said Landmark is very interested in obtaining and testing the Sony eyeware that Regal is using on a trial basis in Seattle.

As to those theaters that Landmark will not convert to digital projection, Mundorff said he would investigate the feasiblity of installing Rear Windows Captioning devices. 

Mundorff also acknowledged that Landmark may be in a position to encourage more of the independent and art-house film-makers to include captioning as part of their package, and Mundorff committed to asking for captioning. Captions are done under contract with the studios by an operational arm of WGBH public television, and are furnished to the theaters without charge. According to WGBH, the one-time cost of captioning a typical movie is less than $2,000.

In Washington, Landmark owns the Egyptian, Harvard Exit, Guild 45th, Metro, Varsity and Crest theaters, all in Seattle. In California, Landmark owns the Landmar, NuArt and Regent in Los Angeles, the Hillcrest, Ken and La Jolla Village in San Diego, the Embarcadero, Bridge, Lumiere, Opera Plaza, Aquarius and Guild in San Francisco and the Peninsula, and the Albany Twin, California, Piedmont and Shattuck in the East Bay.  

AMC's formal announcement of a nationwide commitment to captioning came in the form of a corporate press release dated Dec. 20. That press release was anticlimatic. AMC orally made that commitment in an Aug. 10 meeting involving representatives of the Association of Late Deafened Adults (ALDA), myself and attorneys from the public-interest firm of Disability Rights Advocates in Berkeley. The meeting with AMC was a follow-up to the resolution of a lawsuit ALDA filed against Cinemark in California. In an amicable resolution of that action, Cinemark, America's third-largest movie-theater owner, committed to closed-captioning of all its first-run theaters in California upon conversion to digital projection, then made that commitment national in scope. Regal, America's largest theater owner, made a similar commitment.

AMC initially resisted any commitment to full captioning. In July, though, the King County Superior Court ruled in a lawsuit brought by the Washington State Communication Access Project (Wash-CAP) that AMC can afford to provide the necessary equipment to show all caption-equipped movies in captioned form, and ordered AMC to do so within 90 days of conversion to digital projection. Although it is appealing that order, AMC made a verbal commitment to full captioning shortly after that decision.

Although it has been a long time coming, I believe we are now moving towards a time when those of us with significant hearing loss will be able to enjoy any movie, any time, with our friends and families.

 

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

Seattle's three largest live theatres continue to offer accessible performances during the 2011-12 season for people with hearing loss through both captioning and sign-interpreted performances.

Here is the lineup at the Paramount Theatre:

West Side Story, Sunday, Jan. 15, ASL performance 1:00 p.m., captioned performance 6:30 p.m.

Beauty and the Beast, Sunday, Feb. 26, ASL performance 1:00 p.m.; captioned performance 6:30 p.m.

Mamma Mia, Sunday, March 25, ASL performance 1:00 p.m.; captioned performance 6:30 p.m.

Cats, Sunday, April 22, ASL performance 1:00 p.m.; captioned performance 6:30 p.m.

Million Dollar Quartet, Sunday, May 20, ASL performance 1:00 p.m.; captioned performance 6:30 p.m.

American Idiot, Sunday, June 10, ASL performance 1:00 p.m.; captioned performance 6:30 p.m.

Captions are prepared in advance from the script, and displayed on a portable LED reader-board in synch with the pace of the actual performance. Paramount sets aside a block of seats from which both the caption-display board and the on-stage action are visible in the same line of sight. Tickets are offered at a discounted price, and can be purchased on line.

Here is the lineup for Seattle's Fifth Avenue Theatre:

Captioned performances:

Cinderella, Sunday, Dec. 18, 1:30 p.m.

Oklahoma, Saturday, March 3, 2:00 p.m.

First Date, Thursday, April 19, 8:00 p.m.

Damn Yankees, Thursday, May 17, 8:00 p.m.

Rent, Saturday, Aug. 18, 8:00 p.m.

ASL performances:

Cinderella, Thursday, Dec. 22, 7:30 p.m.

Oklahoma, Saturday, March 3, 8:00 p.m.

First Date, Friday, March 30, 8:00 p.m.

Damn Yankees, Saturday, May 19, 8:00 p.m.

Rent, Saturday, Aug. 18, 8:00 p.m.

Tickets are available at a discounted price by email, ticketing@5thavenue.org.

In addition to volume-enhancing Assistive Listening Devices, 5th Avenue also offers a copy of the script with a book light for all shows to enable patrons with hearing loss to follow the dialogue. The script and booklight may be reserved in advance by email, ticketing@5thavenue.org, and permits patrons with hearing loss to enjoy productions if they cannot attend on the dates set aside for captioned or ASL-interpreted performances.

Here is the schedule for Seattle Repertory Theatre's captioned performances:

How to Write a New Book for the Bible, Thursday, Jan. 19, 7:30 p.m.

Red, Thursday, March 1, 7:30 p.m.

Clybourne Park, Thursday, April 26, 7:30 p.m.

Tickets may be purchased online by clicking on the links above.

Seattle Rep also offers ASL-interpreted performances. That schedule is available at www.tadanw.org.

 

 

 

 

 

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

The nationally renowned Oregon Shakespeare Festival is making its 2012 season fully accessible for people with hearing loss by scheduling 24 open-captioned performances and ten signed performances. Better yet, OSF will make unscheduled performances accessible upon request, provided that seats are still available in the captioned sections.

The captions are prepared in advance in-house, and are displayed in two or three line increments on a portable LED board. Seats are blocked out in areas from which the action on stage and the captions can be seen in the same line of sight. A live operatore advances the captions in synch with the pace of the performace, enabling us to read along and "hear" the dialogue with our eyes.

OSF is also clustering its captioned performances into five separate blocks. This was done in part at the request of the Oregon Communication Access Project (OR-CAP). We noted that because of OSF's remote location in the lovely town of Ashland, Oregon, patrons don't generally make multiple visits in a season. Rather, they go once or twice, stay for several days, and see a number of plays. The clustering arrangement makes it possible for those of us who need captioning to enjoy the festival in the same manner as our friends and families.

Tickets in the captioned section are available at a discount, but the patrons must specify that they want to have tickets in the captioned section. Otherwise, they might be given seats from which the captions are not readily visible. The tickets may be ordered over the telephone or online at boxoffice@osfashland.org.

As usual, OSF's 11-play schedule is a mix of Shakespeare, works by other well-known playwrights, and new works.

The cluster dates for captioned performances are:

March 29-31 for Romeo and Juliet, Animal Crackers, The White Snake and Seagull.

May 10-13 for Romeo and Juliet, Medea/Macbeth/Cinderella, Seagull, The White Snake and Troilus and Cressida.

July 26-29 for The Merry Wives of Windsor, Iowa, As You Like It, Party People, Henry V and Animal Crackers.

Sept. 7-9 for Medea/Macbeth/Cinderella, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Iowa, As You Like It, All the Way and Henry V.

Oct. 18-20 for Party People, Troilus and Cressida, All the Way, Romeo and Juliet and Animal Crackers.

The clusters for sign-interpreted performances are:

April 26-30 for Animal Crackers, The White Snake and Romeo and Juliet.

July 12-14 for Henry V, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Iowa, and As You Like It.

Sept. 21-23 for Medea/Macbeth/Cinderella, All the Way and Party People.

OSF regularly draws patrons from throughout the country, and particularly from Oregon, Washington and California. Despite the economic downturns, 2010 and 2011 were two of OSF's most successful seasons -- well over 90% of all available tickets were sold, and some plays were sold out for their entire runs. For that reason, it is never too early to order tickets.

OSF has been an absolute joy to work with on improving access for people with hearing loss. For those of us who have abandoned live theater, this is a great opportunity to participate once again.

 

 

 

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

At its national convention last week, the Association of Late Deafened Adults (ALDA) highlighted the importance of access to public facilities by honoring me with the I. King Jordan award. The award, named for the first deaf president of Gallaudet University, was given in recognition of the work done to increase the availability of captioned entertainment, particularly at movie theaters.

In a sense, ALDA was honoring itself, and rightly so. ALDA was the organizational plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit filed in California against Cinemark theaters, America's third-largest theater chain. Along with Disability Rights Advocates, a public-interest law firm based in Berkeley, I represented ALDA in that case. The case was amicably resolved when Cinemark agreed to install and use captioning equipment at all of its first-run theaters in California.

After resolving the California case, Cinemark extended its commitment to full captioning nationwide. It uses a personal viewing device called CaptiView that is attached to a flexible goose-neck that fits into the cup-holder on the theater seat. The captions are transmitted wirelessly to the device and shown in lighted type. The devices are shielded so as not to disturb other viewers. Unlike the more familiar Rear Windows Captioning system, the CaptiView devices can be used equally well from any seat, and the captions are not interrupted when someone behind the viewer stands up.

At the ALDA convention, I received very favorable feedback from a number of people throughout the country that have experienced captioned movies with the CaptiView devices. Many of them said they had not been able to enjoy movies for years, but are thrilled to be able to join friends and family members at the theater.

After the Cinemark case had concluded, ALDA, DRA and I initiated conversations with AMC theaters, America's second-largest theater chain. AMC also agreed to provide full captioning capability in its first-run California theaters. We were able to sign that agreement at the convention. We understand that AMC also plans now to make captions available everywhere once its theaters are converted to digital projection.

Regal Cinemas, America's largest chain, also has committed to full captioning after digital conversion. Regal showed an open-captioned movie for ALDA conference attendees on the evening prior to the convention opening, and received thanks and recognition at the conference.

Earlier this year, the Civil Rights Section of the Washington State Bar presented me with this year's Distinguished Service Award. That was a welcome recognition that securing the rights and opportunities that federal and state disability laws extend to people with hearing loss is very much a part of the same civil-rights movement that has opened doors that may have been barred because of race, religion, gender, sexual orientation or other characteristics that ought not be relevant.

None of those objectives could have been achieved without the support of organizations like ALDA, the Washington State Communication Access Project (Wash-CAP) and the Oregon Communication Access Project (OR-CAP). Their willingness to clearly and persistently articulate our needs has made it possible to enrich the lives of all of us that live with hearing loss.

 

 

 

 

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

The University of Oregon announced this week that it is beginning to offer open captioning of the stadium announcements at its football stadium, and continues to investigate doing the same at its other athletic venues. When that program is fully implemented, the U of O will become the national pace-setter in making athletic facilities accessible to fans with hearing loss.

The captions will be displayed on the scoreboards, visible to all attendees from any seat. A remote captioner working through a telephone or internet connection will convert the public-address announcements, penalty calls and intermission information into text form, accessible to anyone unable to hear what is being said.

The announcement comes after almost two years of ongoing advocacy efforts by individuals in the Eugene, Oregon area, and after a series of meetings between the university athletic department and representatives from the Oregon Communication Access Project (OR-CAP). While other universities have The continuing cooperation between the university and the advocacy groups enabled us to reach this outcome without litigation or animosity.

The driving force behind the advocacy effort was the completion of the Matthew Knight Arena, the home of Oregon's basketball and volleyball teams. Several members of the Hearing Loss Association of Oregon contacted the athletic department, and became part of an ongoing effort to design disability-frlendly features for the new arena.

The university intially offered to provide captioning displayed on portable hand-held devices. After field-testing the devices, though, the advocates felt that they did not provide effective communication for a number of reasons that they enumerated in writing to the U of O. Chief among those reasons were the need to check the devices in and out, the frequent difficulties in establishing and maintaining connections, the difficulty of looking down to the device and back up at the field and court, and the inconvenience and "yuck" factor stemming from the need to tote the devices to the rest room.

In order to resolve the apparent impasse, U of O undertook a series of regular community meetings beginning in June of this year with an advocacy team from OR-CAP and some members of the Deaf community in Eugene. While U of O took our concerns about the shortcomings of hand-held devices seriously, university officials were initially uncertain about how scoreboard captioning could actually be undertaken at the Knight Arena.

Fortunately, our team included Carol Studenmund and Lisa Monfils from LNS Captioning in Portland. Carol, who is under contract with the National Basketball Association to provide captioning at the annual All Star Weekend. She demonstrated to U of O officials that the screens on the central Jumbotron scoreboards could be reconfigured to slightly reduce the vertical dimension of the replay screen, making room for two lines of captioned text below. U of O asked our group whether that was acceptable, and we were ecstatic.

After resolving the arena problem, the university turned its attention to its other athletic facilities. It was able to make scoreboard captioning a reality at its football facility in time for the home opener last week. It expects to provide captioning capability at the baseball park in time for the 2012 season, and at its track facility not only for the spring track season but for the Olympic Trials that will take place in Eugene next summer.

One legitimate question U of O officials raised is what events need to be captioned. They were particularly concerned about lightly attended events for which no admission may be charged. We agreed with them that it would be reasonable to establish an expected attendance threshhold at which the event will automatically be captioned, then to make captioning available upon request for events that would fall below that threshhold. That arrangement, we believe, will expose people who think their hearing is "normal" to the benefits of captioning without burdening the university with the expense of providing captions where there would be little or no audience or interest -- an arrangement we believe to be consistent with the "undue burden" defense of the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Stadium captioning has been an ongoing legal challenge. The National Association of the Deaf has spearheaded successful legal actions against the Washington Redskins professional footbal team and the Ohio State University, and is currently involved in litigation against the University of Kentucky. Too often, facility managers have taken the position that one does not need to hear the public-address announcements to enjoy a sports event. But as the court said the in the Redskins case, the announcements, information, songs, etc., are all provided "for a reason," and therefore, if it's something that enhances the overall experience for the hearing fans, it's something that the deaf and hard of hearing fans are also entitled to enjoy.

The polite but persistent advocacy of the OR-CAP and HLA-OR members, the technical savvy from LNS and above all the good work and good will of Mike Duncan and the University of Oregon athletic and technical people have created a national model for accessible athletic venues, one that we hope other universities around the country will emulate.

The Oregon Communication Access Project (OR-CAP) is a non-profit membership corporation whose purpose is to enrich the lives of individuals with hearing loss by making public places accessible through means such as captioning. It is a sister organization of the Washington State Communication Access Project (Wash-CAP). John Waldo, an attorney with a significant hearing loss, is counsel to both groups. 

 

 

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

Captioned theater will make its first appearance in Portland in August, when Portland Center for Performing Arts begins offering one captioned showing of each of its seven Broadway musical presentations. The first captioned presentation will be Mamma Mia! Sunday evening, Aug. 28, at 6:30 p.m.

PCPA introduced live captioning to Portland in cooperation with the Oregon Communication Access Project (OR-CAP), a sister organization to Wash-CAP. Like the Washington organization, OR-CAP is a non-profit membership corporation comprised largely of people with significant hearing loss, which has as its purpose expanding access to public facilities for those of us whose hearing loss has made participation in those activities difficult.

PCPA is partnering with the Theatre Development Fund from New York City, which provides financial assistance for start-up captioning efforts. Such assistance is extended on the basis that the theater will continue captioning thereafter. The captioning is actually done by c2net, also from New York, which provides theater captioning at numerous venues around the country, including those Seattle theaters that now offer such performances.

The captions -- dialogue, song lyrics and other aural information -- are prepared in advance, then displayed by a live operator in synch with the pace of that evening's performance. The captions are displayed on a portable LED reader-board placed to one side of the stage. Seats are set aside in an area of the theater from which the caption board and the stage are in the same line of sight, minimizing the need to look back and forth as the patron reads along with the performance.

The captioned performances will all take place at 6:30 p.m. on the final Sunday of each production's run.

Tickets for the captioned performances may be ordered at the box office, 1111 SW Broadway, by calling 503-248-4335 or online at boxoffice@pcpa.com.

Here is the full season:

Mamma Mia! -- Sunday, Aug. 28

Shrek the Musical! -- Sunday, Sept. 18, 6:30 p.m.

West Side Story -- Sunday, Jan. 8, 6:30 p.m.

Beauty and the Beast -- Sunday, Feb. 19, 2012, 6:30 p.m.

Wicked -- Sunday, March 25, 2012, 6:30 p.m.

Million Dollar Quartet -- Sunday, May 27, 2012, 6:30 p.m.

Jersey Boys -- Sunday, Aug. 5, 2012, 6:30 p.m.

"OR-CAP is pleased PCPA is responding in such a positive way to our request for the captioning of live performances," said OR-CAP President David Viers. "This will greatly enhance the theater-going experience for the thousands of us with hearing loss in the Portland Metro area."

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

Washington's Law against Discrimination requires movie theaters to install equipment to show closed captions, according to a ruling issued today by a King County Superior Court judge. AMC, America's second-largest theater chain, will therefore be required to install captioning equipment once it converts its theaters to digital projection.

The ruling by Judge Regina Cahan came in a lawsuit that the Washington State Communication Access Project (Wash-CAP) filed in 2009 against the corporate theater owners doing business in King County, which includes Seattle and the Bellevue area. I represented Wash-CAP in the case.

Our lawsuit was filed under Washington state law, not under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Our state law and regulations require businesses like movie theaters to undertake actions "reasonably possible in the circumstances" to make their goods and services "accessible," and further define "accessible" as "usable or understandable."

Despite that clear language, the theater defendants claimed that they had no legal obligation to provide captioning. Judge Cahan rejected that argument in 2010. She then scheduled a trial limited to the question of what each of the defendants could reasonably be expected to do. Prior to the scheduled May trial date, two of the major corporate defendants -- Regal and Cinemark -- essentially surrendered, and agreed to equip all of their King County theaters to show closed-captioned movies. Subsequently, they agreed to full captioning on a nationwide basis.

The May trial was submitted based on stipulated facts. AMC would not commit to any specific level of captioning, saying only that it would increase the amount of captioning offered at its Seattle-area theaters. Regal and Cinemark argued that because they had fully equipped all of their theaters, there was no remaining legal controversy, and the case against them should be dismissed. (We had dismissed the three smaller defendants for various reasons).

We argued that even though Regal and Cinemark had done what we asked, the court should still enter a ruling to the effect that all theaters have legal obligations to be accessible to people with hearing loss. That was important to us because that ruling becomes a precedent that may be useful in other parts of the state, and because it would give us the ability to ensure that those theaters both live up to their commitments and perhaps incorporate future improvements in captioning technology.

With respect to AMC, we presented financial information showing that AMC can readily afford the cost of equipping all of its theaters to show captions once they convert their theaters to digital projection. Moreover, she noted that because Regal and Cinemark are providing full captioning, AMC had to demonstrate why it couldn't do the same, but that AMC had not provided any evidence suggesting that it was not financially able to do so. Therefore, the judge ruled that within 90 days of converting to digital projection, AMC must equip enough theater auditoriums with captioning equipment to enable it so show in captioned form all movies that come with captions.

The judge made one other very important and welcome observation. Defendants had submitted evidence to the effect that very few people were using the captioning equipment that Cinemark has installed at its theater complex in Federal Way. That does not matter, the judge said. "The issue is not how many patrons have used the technology provided, but rather, whether an individual with a sensory disability has the legal right to have access to the movies when technology is now present to allow that access without impeding on other patron's experience and it is feasible for the defendant to provide it."

We hope that in light of this ruling, AMC will join Regal and Cinemark in making movies fully accessible to individuals with hearing loss throughout the country. 

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

Regal and CInemark, the nation's first and third largest theater chains respectively, have reaffirmed their commitment to full movie captioning, and have stated that the capability will be in place by the end of 2012.

Regal's announcement came in the form of a corporate press release dated May 4. That release appears to clarify what had previously been mixed signals. While Regal officials filed a declaration in our Washington lawsuit saying that Regal planned full captioning, the official corporate position articulated in official filings with the federal Securities and Exchange Commission had been that Regal was "considering its options." Evidently, that consideration led to a formal decision to provide full accessibility for patrons with hearing loss.

The announcement appears to apply to all Regal theaters, including those that Regal operates under the Edwards or United Artist nameplates.

The press release also noted that Regal will partner with Captionfish, the website that lists captioned and subtitled movies around the country, and which is becoming the go-to site for captioning information.

Regal is going to employ closed captioning, in which the captions are visible only to individuals that obtain and use a personal viewing device. In Seattle, the first market where Regal has completed installation of captioning equipment, Regal is testing special eyewear -- glasses that project the captions on the lens itself. Although somewhat ungainly lookling, the glasses have received very positive reviews from Wash-CAP members who have used them.

The closed captioning will substitute for the open-caption showings that Regal has offered at a few locations, and which some users prefer. The trade-off, though, is that instead of only a few locations and a few often-inconvenient show-times, the closed captioning will be available every day for all showings of all movies for which captions have been prepared by the studios.

Cinemark has also committed to full closed captioning. While Cinemark had already equipped all of the auditoriums at its Federal Way and Olympia multiplexes in Washington to show closed-captioned movies, the nationwide commitment came in the form of a press release issued last week. The press release announced the amicable resolution of a lawsuit filed in California by the Association of Late Deafened Adults and two individuals. I represented the plaintiffs in that action, in partnership with Disability Rights Advocates, a public-interest law firm in Berekely, California.

The captioning capability will be introduced as part of Regal and Cinemark's conversion to digital projection, in which traditional film ceases to exist, and the movies are reduced to digital data, transmitted either over the internet or on computer discs to the individual theaters. Captions can be included in that digital package. The captions are transmitted wirelessly from the projector/servers in each auditorium to the viewing devices.

Among the major theater chains, the holdout now is AMC, which has not yet committed to any particular amount of captioning. We think that will be a difficult position to maintain, especially in light of the commitments made by Regal and Cinemark. The first test of the legal soundness of AMC's position will come later this month, when we have final arguments in the lawsuit Wash-CAP filed against the major corporate theater chains in Seattle.

 

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

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. 

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

Regal Cinemas, the nation's largest movie-theater chain, has committed that as it converts its first-run movie theaters to digital projection, it will provide the necessary equipment to display closed captions for all showings of all movies for which the studios have provided captions. Regal began that process in the greater Seattle area, where it has made all the auditoriums at its Auburn, Thornton Place, Landing and Bella Bottega complexes caption-capable.

As of today (Feb. 20), Regal is showing seven captioned movies at the Bella Bottega complex in Redmond, seven captioned movies at the Landing complex in Renton, eight at its complex in Auburn and ten at its Thornton Place complex in north Seattle.

The captioning pledge came in the form of a declaration from Regal chief operating officer Randy Smith submitted as part of Wash-CAP's ongoing litigation in King County, Washington, against the corporate theater owners that operate in the Seattle area. The case had been scheduled to go to trial in March of this year. Regal sought to avoid the trial by making a commitment to provide captioning.

Notably, Smith's statement did not just apply to the Regal theaters that are involved in the Seattle lawsuit. What he said was that as Regal converts theaters to digital projection, it will provide captioning capabilities, including at its Seattle theaters. The Seattle area appears to be the first location where this commitment has been implemented, at least in part.

Regal has in the past shown open captioned movies at a small number of its theaters. Regal believes that open captions, visible to the entire audience, are distracting and undesirable to hearing patrons. Therefore, it activates the open captioning only for a very few showings, generally at less-than-ideal times.

Closed captions are visible only to patrons who request and use a viewing device. Because closed captioning does not interfere with the movie-going experience of others, the theaters are willing to engage the captions for all showings.

Regal is apparently using a new device to show closed-captioned movies. The viewing device is attached to a gooseneck that fits into the seat cupholder. Unlike the more familiar Rear Windows system where captions are displayed in mirror image on an LED reader-board fixed to the rear wall of the theater and viewed on a reflector, the captions are transmitted wirelessly. This has the advantage of making the system equally usable from every seat in the theater, and it is also not subject to interruption if somebody stands up behind the viewer. The disadvantage,though, is that unlike the transparent Rear Window reflector that can be superimposed on the movie screen, the viewing device is solid. That means it has to be placed below or to the side of the screen, which means the captions and the movie are in different lines of sight, or the viewing device blocks some of the picture, not unlike the captions we seen on television.

Eyewear that displays captions is in the development stage. It is currently not available commercially, but may be developed and marketed in the future, and that may provide a better viewing experience than the devices that are now available.

At present, there is no well-developed technology for showing captions with 3-D movies, so most of the movies without captions at the Regal complexes are 3-D. Captions are provided by the studios, not by the theaters, and while most of the major-studio first-run releases are captioned, some are not, most notably (and ironically), "The King's Speech." So it appears to me that the Regal theaters that have provided full captioning capability are showing closed captions for all the movies that have captions available.

Regal is tying the provision of closed captioning to its program to convert its first-run theaters to digital projection, where film is replaced by digital data packages. Regal has converted all of its first-run theater complexes in King County to digital projection, and evidently plans to add captioning capability to the complexes in Issaquah, Bellevue, Tukwila and downtown Seattle that presently lack it.

Regal is following the same path as Cinemark/Century, the nation's third-largest theater owner, which has equipped all of the auditoriums at its two Washington complexes -- one in Federal Way and one in Olympia -- to show closed-captioned movies. Cinemark has essentially done everything we asked for in the lawsuit, and it appears the Regal will do so as well. We haven't received any specific information that Cinemark plans to equip its theaters in other parts of the country to show captions, but we would be surprised if they don't do that, because it would be difficult to explain how it was economically possible to offer full access in Washington but not possible to do so in other areas.

Lincoln Square in Bellevue has also committed to provide closed captioning in all of its theaters. In the interim, it is showing many of its movies with open captions at selected times.

The holdout new in our Seattle case is AMC, the nation's second-largest theater chain. It is taking the position that it should only be required to do what the federal Department of Justice may direct as part of the ongoing rule-making process. We don't think that is a viable argument. DOJ's proposal to require captioning for only 50% of the movies being shown at a given location has come under withering fire, and DOJ has provided at least some circumstantial indication that it will either jettison that proposal altogether or, at the very least, defer to court interpretations of what it is reasonable to expect each theater chain to do.

I'm aware that many of us with hearing loss would prefer open captioning. Unfortunately, the federal Americans with Disabilities Act and the implementing regulations make it quite clear that private businesses like theaters can choose the kind of accommodation they wish to provide, and the theaters have not been willing to provide open captioning, at least not for every showing. But there does not appear to be any legally viable way to require open captions.

I don't give up hope completely -- we may be able to persuade at least some theaters to voluntarily offer occasional open-captioned showings, perhaps upon request from some number of patrons. But rather than lament the absence of open captioning, I think we should direct our energies to working cooperatively with the theaters on finding the most effective means of showing closed-captioned movies.

The dominoes appear to be falling, and universal access to the movies may be a reality in very short order.

 

 

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

As previously reported, the federal Department of Justice is considering adopting a regulation that would require movie theaters to show half of their movies with closed captions. Because Congress gave the DOJ the authority to adopt regulations interpreting the portion of the Americans with Disabilities Act that applies to movie theaters, a DOJ regulation would become the law of the land, and for that reason, getting it right is really important.

We were pleased to see DOJ finally getting involved with the critical issue of movie captioning. That said, though, we don't think the proposal for 50% access phased in over five years got it even close to right. In our opinion, there is simply no reason why the major corporate theater owners cannot equip every one of their theaters to show captions for all movies that have had captions prepared. We also think the five-year phase-in is unnecessary, since the major theater chains intend to fully convert to digital projection in far less time, and can easily equip their theaters to show captioned movies at the time they convert to digital.

DOJ held three public hearings on the movie-captioning proposal and three other proposals dealing with website access, access to 911 emergency services, and accessible furniture. The third and last hearing took place in San Francisco on January 10, and a number of us testified about movie captioning.

The hearing itself was a model of accessibility. All of the testimony was real-time captioned and ASL-interpreted. It was also streamed live over the internet. 

I testified on behalf of a number of organizations to the effect that captioning should be required, but that rather than impose any sort of performance standard like 50%, theaters should be required to provide full accessibility unless doing so would constitute an "undue burden," which would need to be determined on a case-by-case, business-by-business basis. Other very good testimony came from the attorneys directly involved in the Harkins movie-captioning case, Rose Daly-Rooney of the Arizona Attorney General's Office and from J.J. Rico of the Arizona Disability Law Center.

(Both thevideo and a written transcript are now available on line. My testimony is at 271:02 of the video).

I spoke afterwards to John Wodatch, who presided at the hearing. What I found curious was that even though DOJ was proposing a rule to require only 50% captioning, it filed a brief in Arizona saying that the proper standard was "undue burden," and that determining what constituted an "undue burden" was a matter for courts rather than for the DOJ. He indicated to me that the 50% requirement was really nothing more than a starting point, but that DOJ was very seriously considering the arguments that "undue burden" must be determined on an entity-by-entity basis rather than being suitable for an industry-wide rule. He also said he was impressed by the testimony from witnesses like J.J. Rico and me concerning the financial ability of the major movie theaters.

Comments on the proposed rule are being accepted through Monday, Jan. 26. Here are the comments I filed on behalf of several organizations. Individuals wishing to comment can go online to , www.regulations.gov/#!documentDetail;D=DOJ-CRT-2010-0007-0001, hit the "submit comment" button and file their personal comments that way.

 

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

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.

 

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

A column in this morning's San Jose (Cal.) Mercury News takes another sympathetic look at the lawsuit filed last week in Oakland by the Association of Late Deafened Adults (ALDA) and two individuals against Cinermark theaters.

Author Patty Fisher recounts the frustration people with hearing loss face when trying to go to the movies. Her conclusion: with 36 million Americans having some degree of hearing loss, and that number climbing rapidly, the theaters ought to be doing whatever is required to get people away from their DVD viewers and into the theaters.

Her conclusion mirrors mine. The movie theaters are doing everything possible to create an experience that can't be duplicated at home -- witness the push for 3D movies. Yet they ignore the needs of those of us who are at home with our captioned DVDs by necessity rather than by choice.

My office is representing the California plaintiffs in tandem with Disability Rights Advocates of Berkeley, a public-interest law firm that specializes in precedent-setting litigation to benefit people with disabilities. We are asking the California court to certify the case as a class action.

While America's two largest theater chains, Regal and AMC, show some captioned films, although often at odd hours, Cinemark, the third largest chain, has done little or nothing to make its theaters accessible to people with hearing loss. Cinemark failed to respond to DRA's letter asking for a commitment to provide captioning, and has so far evidently failed to respond to any of the reporters covering the story who have asked for comment.

While the complaint and the stories reference Rear Windows Captioning (RWC), what we are actually seeking is effective means of making aurally delivered information available to those of us with hearing losses -- the definition of "auxiliary aids and services" in the Americans with Disabilities Act. The ADA requires so-called "public accommodations" -- privately owned open to the public -- to furnish auxiliary aids and services where necessary to provide patrons with full and equal enjoyment of their goods and services unless the business can demonstrate the providing such aids and services would fundamentally alter the nature of the business or impose an "undue burden."

The ADA gives public accommodations the right to select from among any effective means of communication, and the theaters are looking at a variety of display devices. The captions are prepared by the Media Access Group at WGBH public television, and distributed free of charge to the theaters. The theaters must only purchase and install the equipment necessary to display the captions. RWC is an existing and viable means of displaying captions, but the theaters may be able to find and install other equipment.

Because closed captioning, where captions are visible only to patrons who request viewing devices, does not significantly interfere with the movie-going experience for others, we do not believe closed captioning can constitute a fundamental alteration. Nor do we think the cost imposes an undue burden.  The quoted cost of $10,000 per theater represents a "worst-case scenario" cost of equipping an individuals theater -- volume discounts on equipment can cut that cost in half. Moreover, the theaters are spending well over ten times that amount to convert to digital display, where computerized data replaces celluloid film. And when those conversions are completed, the cost to provide captioning drops every considerably.

We continue to ask the question Judge Alex Kozinski of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals asked of counsel for the Harkins theater chain in a movie-captioning case out of Arizona -- why are the theaters fighting about this? In that case, the Ninth Circuit ruled in April in that case that ADA does indeed require theaters to offer auxiliary aids and services like closed captioning, yet Cinemark has so far done nothing in the way of either providing those services or even making a commitment to do so. We would hope that rather than continue to fight the captioning battle in many different areas of the country, the theaters would just do the right thing.

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

A lawsuit to require movie captioning filed Nov. 30 by our office and a well-known disability-rights law firm in California has generated a welcome blitz of very sympathetic media coverage.

The case was filed in Oakland, California, on behalf of the Association of Late Deafened Adults (ALDA) and two individual plaintiffs against Cinemark Holdings, America's third-largest movie-theater chain that operates both the Cinemark and Century theaters. The class-action complaint asks that Cinemark equip its theaters in Alameda County, California, to show captioned movies.

My office is working in conjunction with Disability Rights Advocates of Berkeley, a prominent and experienced public-interest firm that specializes in precedent-setting litigation to advance the interests of people with disabilities. DRA litigation director Sid Wolinsky and senior attorney Kevin Knestrick are leading DRA's efforts.

The case comes in the aftermath of a decision in April by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals declaring that the Americans with Disabilities Act requires movie theaters to offer closed-captioned movies unless the theaters can demonstrate that doing so would constitute an "undue burden." Despite that holding, Cinemark, which has a very substantial presence in the Oakland-Berkeley area of California, continues to be the only major theater chain that does nothing to make first-run movies available to individuals with hearing loss. After Cinemark ignored a letter from DRA asking for a commitment to provide captioning, the suit was filed.

The San Francisco CBS-TV affiliate made the lawsuit the lead story on its local newscast that evening, and the ABC-TV station also provided substantial coverage. In both cases, the reporters interviewed one of the individual plaintiffs, who explained that they simply want to join the millions of Americans who enjoy movies every week, and one of the DRA lawyers. The lawyers explained that technology such as Rear Windows Captioning enables movie-goers who need captions to see them without interfering with the movie-going experience of the remaining audience. (Unfortunately, the television captions were lost when the story was put on the internet -- another story for another time -- although the ABC station posts a copy of the narrative).

The story also received print coverage in the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Associated Press wrote a short story, which has been reprinted in a number of outlets.

While we were pleased the the United States Department of Justice has announced plans to possibly require that at least some theaters be required to show captioned movies, implementing a requirement through regulations is time-consuming and uncertain -- a new federal administration could abandon the plan altogether. So we think it is important to continue involving the courts, particularly in states like California and Washington where state law is at least as powerful as federal law.

The California case is conceptually similar to the case Wash-CAP filed in 2009 in Seattle against all three major corporate theater owners and three smaller operations. While our case in Washington is based exclusively on our Washington state law, the California case claims violations of both California state law and the ADA.

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

 Washington State Ferries, the nation's largest ferry system, will shortly install a system to display visually the content of announcements made at its terminals and onboard its vessels. The system will be tested on board the two large boats serving the Seattle-Bainbridge Island crossing, and at the Bainbridge and Seattle terminals, for a six-month test, and if successful, will then be installed system-wide.

 

The ferry system makes a considerable number of announcements over public-address systems on its boats and at its terminals. While some are routine and relatively unimportant, others can be quite specific and very important, dealing with matters like lost objects, cars with lights or alarms on, vessel delays, or changes in loading or unloading procedures. Those announcements have often been inaccessible to riders with hearing loss.

Aurally delivered information can be made available to individuals with hearing loss by converting that information to written form and displaying it visually. That involves a two-step process, either of which can be problematic. First, the information has to be "captured" and put into written form. Second, the information has to be displayed in a manner visible to people who need to know what is being said.

For the ferry system, the display part was easy -- there are ample places to put television monitors or other devices to show announcements. The difficult issue was the "capture" -- discovering how best to put the messages in written form.

The firm with which WSF is contracting, Four WInds Interactive from Denver, is going to address that problem with a drop-down menu that will allow the crew to make the message specific without needing to do much, if any, keyboard entry. The standard boarding, welcome and safety messages will all be prepared in advance in written form. For variable messages like "car alarm," the program will display a menu of auto makes and colors, and can indicate the deck of the ferry on which the car is located. Similarly, the "lost object" menu can specify whether the item is a wallet, cell phone, keys, or other object.

The test system should be installed on the Bainbridge boats and the Bainbridge and Seattle terminals by mid-December, according to WSF officials. The timing is particularly appropriate, because those boats are often crowded with holiday shoppers even at mid-day, and the more crowded and noisy the boats, the greater the need for the information broadcast over the public-address system to be made visually accessible to people with less than perfect hearing.

Installation of the visual paging system is being done to resolve a lawsuit that the Washington State Communication Access Project (Wash-CAP) brought against WSF in 2008. The suit was quickly resolved in the form of an agreed order signed by the court. WSF has been working promptly and diligently to implement the terms of that order, and deserves our commendation and thanks.

 

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

The renowned Oregon Shakespeare Festival has developed plans that, when fully implemented, will make it the nation’s most accessible live theater for people with hearing loss. OSF will schedule 20 captioned drama presentations in the 2011 season, almost doubling its scheduled captioned offerings in 2010. But even better, OSF hopes to be able to offer open captioning on request (once the captions are completed) for any of its plays, given adequate notice.

Those plans were unveiled at a mid-October meeting involving OSF’s Executive Director Paul Nicholson, Access Coordinator Jim Amberg and Audience Service Manager Radawna Wallace, Oregon Communication Access Project (OR-CAP) Vice President Clark Anderson and me, representing both OR-CAP and the Washington State Communication Access Project (Wash-CAP).

OSF is located in Ashland, Oregon, a lovely but remote small town located almost equidistant between Sacramento, California and Portland, Oregon. It draws patrons from throughout the nation, but most come from California, Oregon and Washington. Unlike patrons at a typical live theater in a major city like Seattle, patrons don’t tend to go to Ashland multiple times during a season. Rather, they go for a long weekend or a full week, and see a number of plays, often two per day.

For the 2010 season, OSF prepared captions for nine of its 11 different plays, but only offered 11 total captioned showings sprinkled throughout the season. On behalf of OR-CAP and Wash-CAP members who wished to enjoy a “full-immersion” Ashland experience, we began communicating with OSF officials early in 2010, asking for an arrangement that would better suit Ashland’s unusual situation.

On our visit in October, we learned that OSF has brought the captioning function in house. All its scripts are available electronically. Once the director has put the play into final form, Amberg and Wallace get busy converting the production script into bite-sized captions, an exacting and labor-intensive process. When that is done, the captions are loaded into a computer, and an on-site operator “performs” the captions in synch with the pace of that particular performance.

As is the case with the captioned theater presentations in Seattle, the captions are displayed on an LED reader-board placed in front of the stage at one side. Patrons requesting captions are seated in areas from where both the captions and the stage are visible in the same line of sight. The seats are offered at the price of OFS’s least-expensive tickets.

The thrust of our discussions with OSF was about the obstacles, if any, to re-using the prepared captions for multiple performances. Our visit disclosed that OSF is thinking along the same lines, and is looking to hire additional technicians familiar enough with both the play itself and the captioning equipment to handle performance captioning. Once that is done, OSF’s plan is to offer captioning upon request any time after the captions are ready.

As usual, OSF’s 2011 season includes a number of Shakespearean plays, together with more modern dramas. An unusual feature for 2011 is the inclusion of a Gilbert & Sullivan operetta, the first time OSF has undertaken a musical presentation.

The scheduled captioned performances will be clustered in 2011 to provide patrons needing captions with the opportunity to enjoy multiple productions during their visit. More information about each play will be available when OSF formally announces its schedule and begins ticket sales.

            Here is OSF’s announced schedule of captioned performances for the 2011 season:

            March 31, 1:30 – Measure for Measure

            April 1, 8:00 – The Language Archive

            April 2, 1:30 – The Imaginary Invalid

            May 18, 8:00 – Julius Caesar

            May 19, 1:30 – To Kill a Mockingbird

            May 20, 8:00 – The Imaginary Invalid

            May 31, 1:30 – August: Osage County

            July 21, 8:30 – The Pirates of Penzance

            July 22, 1:30 – Ghost Light

            July 22, 8:30 – Love’s Labor Lost

            July 23, 8:30 – Henry IV, Part II

            Sept 1, 8:00 – Henry IV, Part II

            Sept. 2, 8:00 – The Pirates of Penzance

            Sept. 3, 8:00 – Love’s Labor Lost

            Sept. 4, 1:30 – The African Company Presents Richard III

            Oct. 18, 1:30 – The African Company Presents Richard III

            Oct. 19, 1:30 – Measure for Measure

            Oct 20, 8:00 – Ghost Light

            Oct. 21, 1:30 – Julius Caesar

            Oct. 22, 8:00 – August, Osage County

Tickets are available by email, boxoffice@osfashland.org. Patrons purchasing tickets in the captioned section should state that they do need captioned seating. More information is available online at http://www.osfashland.org/plays/access.aspx.

OSF’s hope is that once one captioned performance of each play has been presented, subsequent performances may be available with captions upon request. Some advance notice will be required, because many of OSF’s performances sell out, and the seats set aside for those requesting captions will need to be released for purchase by others.

Because the additional display technicians are not yet selected and trained, OSF cannot formally commit to on-request captioning of unscheduled performances for 2011, but will attempt to make such performances available on a test basis in 2011. If that proves feasible, it would then formally offer on-request captioning in 2012, becoming perhaps the most accessible venue in America for people with hearing loss.

OSF will also present nine ASL-interpreted performances in 2011, on the following schedule:

            May 27, 8:00 – Measure for Measure

            May 28, 8:00 – August: Osage County

            May 29, 1:30 – To Kill a Mockingbird

            July 14, 8:30 – The Pirates of Penzance

            July 15, 8:30 – Love’s Labor Lost

            July 16, 8:30 – Henry IV, Part II

            Oct. 14, 8:00 – The African Company Presents Richard III

            Oct. 15, 8:00 – The Imaginary Invalid

            Oct. 16, 1:30 – Julius Caesar

We are excited about OSF’s commitment to access, and look forward to joining audiences from throughout the West and across the nation in enjoying OSF’s outstanding offerings.

           

           

             

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

 Seattle Arts and Lectures has announced that it will caption the presentations of seven authors this year, including an expert on affordable health care, two Pulitzer-Prize winning literary authors and a well-known children's author who will appear in his adult incarnation.

The captioned offerings begin Tuesday, Oct. 5, at 7:30 p.m. in Seattle's Benaroya Hall with T.R. Reid, a former journalist and radio commentator who will talk about the dysfunctional health care system in the United States, where we spend far more money on health care than any other nation but rank a dismal 37th in effectiveness. Reid has spent years examining the health-care systems of other nations that produce better results for far less money, and will share his insights into what those countries can teach us.

On Tuesday, Oct. 19, the speaker will be Sarah Paretsky, author of the best-selling detective works featuring female protagonist V.I. Warshawsky. A one-time community organizer in Chicago, Paretsky has written extensively about women's rights and social-justice issues.

On Tuesday, Nov. 9, Daniel Handler will appear. While Handler has written a number of literary books and short stories for adults, his best-known writing has been as children's author Lemony Snicket, whose 13-book "Series of Unfortunate Events" has sold more than 50 million copies.

On Wednesday, Dec. 8, Picasso biographer John Richardson will speak. His appearance coincides with an exhibition of Picasso masterpieces at the Seattle Art Museum.

On Monday, Jan. 4 (of 2011), Pulitzer-Prize winner Elizabeth Strout will appear. She was awarded the Pulitzer in 2008 for Olive Kitteridge, a series of interconnected stories set in small-town New England.

Prolific author Joyce Carol Oates will appear Monday, April 18. Oates has published over 50 critically acclaimed novels and dozens of short stories.

The captioned season concludes Tuesday, May 10, with an appearance by Richard Ford, who won a Pulitzer Prize for Independence Day, the middle volume of a trilogy chronicling the fictional life of Frank Bascombe.

The captioned presentations are all in the Mark Taper Auditorium at Benaroya Hall. Because the author discussions and question-and-answer sessions are unscripted, the captioning is done in real time by a highly skilled captioner. The captions are displayed on an LED board visible from throughout the auditorium.

Because the captions are available from all seats, no special area is set aside for patrons who need to see the captions. Tickets are available at their regular price, and may be ordered on line.

This is the second season that SAL has captioned some of its author appearances, an effort it undertook at the request of the Washington State Communication Access Project (Wash-CAP). We hope SAL will be able to expand their captioned offerings in the future to become fully accessible to people with hearing loss.

 

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

 Seattle's three largest live theaters will make a total of 18 different productions accessible this season to those of us who have a significant hearing loss but do not use sign language. The season begins this Sunday, September 19 at The Paramount, which apologizes for the short notice, and runs through July 31 of 2011, and includes old favorites like "Guys and Dolls" and "Oklahoma," and newer productions like the award-winning "God of Carnage."

The captions are displayed on an LED reader-board placed at the edge of the stage. Seats are set aside on the lower level near the stage, so that it is possible to see the reader-board and the on-stage action without excessive looking back and forth. The captions, including the dialogue and song lyrics, are prepared in advance, and displayed in synch with the pace of the production, enabling people with (and many people without) a hearing loss to understand exactly what is being said. 

Best of all, the theaters almost always offer significantly discounted ticket prices.

Here is the schedule by theater:

The Paramount:

"Burn the Floor," Sunday, Sept. 19, 6:30 p.m.

"Hair," Saturday, Dec. 4, 8 p.m.

"Rock of Ages," Sunday, Feb. 13, 6:30 p.m.

"Billy Elliot," Sunday, April 3, 6:30 p.m.

"Mary Poppins," Sunday May 29, 6:30 p.m.

Tickets for the captioning area can be ordered on line. Go to the main page, click on the icon for the specific show, then go to the "read more" button following the description. Scroll to the end of that, and you will see the announcement of the open-captioned date and time. Continue following that link. When it takes you to the "purchase ticket" page, the only options that will be displayed are tickets in the captioned section.

Fifth Avenue:

"In the Heights," Friday, Oct. 8, 8 p.m.

"A Christmas Story," Sunday, Dec. 19, 7 p.m.

"Vanities," Friday, March 18, 8 p.m.

"Next to Normal," Wednesday, March 2, 7:30 p.m.

"Nine to Five," Wednesday, April 13, 7:30 p.m.

"Guys and Dolls," Sunday, June 5, 1:30 p.m.

"Oklahoma," Sunday, July 31, 1:30 p.m.

Tickets in the captioned section may be purchased on line by contacting the box-office email address,  ticketing@5thavenue.org

Seattle Repertory Theatre:

"God of Carnage," Thursday, Oct. 7, 7:30 p.m.

"Dancing at Lughnasa," Thursday, Nov. 18, 7:30 p.m.

"The Brothers Size," Feb. 2 (2011), 7:30 p.m.

"Of Mice and Men," March 24 (2011) 7:30 p.m.

"The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs," May 5 (2011) 7:30 p.m.

Seattle Rep has devoted a special page to its captioned shows. Click on the ticket-order form, and it takes you to a diagram of the theater. When you then go to the button that allows you to see a diagram of the theater and select your seats, it limits you to only those seats from which the captioned reader-board is best seen.

This will the the third season that captioned live theater has been available in Seattle. The theaters have worked with the Washington State Communication Access Project and the Theatre Development Fund from New York to bring live theater to those of us whose hearing loss would otherwise prevent us from enjoying this art form.  

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

Bainbridge Cinemas, a locally owned five-screen complex on Bainbridge Island, Washington, has agreed with the Washington State Communication Access Project (Wash-CAP) to begin showing closed-captioned films on a regular basis this fall.

Bainbridge Cinemas will equip one of its five auditoriums to show captioned films using the Rear Windows Captioning system. 

Once Bainbridge Cinemas installs the necessary equipment, it will rotate its films through that auditorium, so that patrons will be able to see two captioned films per week. This rotation plan should mean that most if not all of the movies that Bainbridge Cinemas shows and for which captions are available will actually be shown in captioned form during the first two or three weeks of a film's release. All showings will be captioned.

The captions are contained on a computer disc furnished at no charge to the theaters. The captioning is actually done by the Media Access Group at WGBH public television in Boston, which developed and patented the Rear WIndows system. Roughly 80% of the first-run movies released by the major studios are captioned.

The Rear Windows system displays the written dialogue in mirror image on an LED board mounted on the rear wall of the theater. Patrons wishing to view the written dialogue pick up a reflector -- a transparent plastic panel attached to a flexible gooseneck on a heavy base that fits into the cupholder. The reflector may be adjusted so that the captions appear to the viewer either below or superimposed on the screen, like subtitles. Because the captions are not visible to other patrons who are watching the screen, they do not interfere with the viewing experience of others. 

The theater will keep track of the number of people who request reflectors and their movie companions. We've devised a formula to estimate how much additional revenue the theater receives from installing the captioning equipment, and have agreed that until the theater has recovered the cost of the equipment and installation, we won't ask them to equip another screen for captioning.

The theater will indicate in all of its advertising and on its marquee which movies will be captioned, so that Bainbridge Island residents who want to see captioned movies can plan accordingly.

Personally, I'm delighted by this arrangement for a number of reasons. First and most obviously, I live on Bainbridge Island, and this means my wife and I can go to movies here rather than travel 30-40 minutes to a theater. On a broader scale, I think we've devised an accessibility formula that might prove workable for other small, independent theaters located in relatively isolated communities -- areas that the big theater chains don't serve. Lastly, I'm delighted and grateful that Bainbridge Cinemas is able to devote its limited resources to providing access rather than to a court battle.

Kany Lavine, Bainbridge Cinemas president, anticipates installing the equipment in time for the holiday movie releases that begin appearing around Thanksgiving. Prior to that time, we'll work with Bainbridge Cinemas to promote Bainbridge Cinemas generally and captioned movies specifically throughout our island community.   

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

Wash-CAP won the first round in our movie-captioning case against five corporate defendants when the court ruled that under Washington law, theaters must do what is "reasonably possible" to make their movie soundtracks understandable.

The order from Superior Court Judge Regina Cahan said that the specific steps each theater must take will be decided later at trial. 

Her ruling came on cross-motions from Wash-CAP and the theaters. The theaters argued that nothing in Washington law requires theaters to do anything more than open their doors to people with hearing loss, and treat us exactly the same as everyone else.

Wash-CAP argued that under Washington law, treating us just like everyone else wasn't sufficient. Our state law says that when "same service" -- treating us just like everyone else -- doesn't permit us to fully enjoy a business's services, the business must offer "reasonable accommodation." Our state law defines "reasonable accommodation" as taking those steps "reasonably possible in the circumstances" to make all services "accessible," which in turn is defined as "usable or understandable."

Judge Cahan agreed with us. While she did not specifically endorse captioning, and did not state exactly what any of the theaters must do, she did say the theaters would have to do whatever is "reasonably possible," and she intends to determine at trial exactly what that may be.

Trial is scheduled for March 21, 2011.

In a sense, this ruling is a little anti-climactic, coming as it does on the heels of last week's decision by the Ninth Circuit Court that the Americans with Disabilities Act can requires closed captioning. But for a number of reasons, a decision under our Washington state law will be better for Washington movie-goers than a decision under federal law. 

So now we see what the theaters do. Will they fight to the death in Washington -- not a particularly good venue for them in light of our excellent state law -- or will they fold their tents here and save their legal "firepower" to fight the Ninth Circuit decision?

What I think we can say with considerable assurance is that meaningful access to the movies for people with hearing loss is a whole lot closer to reality today than it was last week.

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

 As we predicted and hoped, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled today that the Americans with Disabilities Act requires movie theaters to show closed-captioned movies unless doing so would constitute an "undue burden."

The ruling came in a case that the Arizona Attorney General's Office filed against the Harkins theater chain. The federal district court ruled that the ADA does not regulate the content of the goods and services offered by businesses, and that the theaters are in the business of showing non-captioned movies. That case was appealed.

The Ninth Circuit opinion said that while ADA does not generally regulate the content of goods and services, ADA does require businesses to provide "auxiliary aids and services," which are defined as including open and closed captioning. That specific provision applies to movie theaters, and controls over the general rule that ADA does not regulate content.

The court noted that when ADA was passed, a statement of purpose from the House of Representatives stated that ADA does not require theaters to show open-captioned movies. That interpretation has been adopted consistently by the federal Department of Justice, which is empowered to interpret ADA. The court said that while DOJ may change its interpretation, the theaters are entitled to rely on it until it is changed. Therefore, theaters are not required to show open-captioned movies.

The Arizona district court ruled that there was no basis for treating closed-captioned movies any differently. The Ninth Circuit disagreed. It said that open-captioning, in which captions are visible to the entire audience, may fundamentally alter the movie-going experience for others. But closed-captioning displays captions only to people who want to see them. "The difference between open and closed captioning is more than linguistic," the opinion states.

The case now goes back to the Arizona district court, where the theaters will be able to argue that closed captioning poses an "undue burden." Because closed captioning is readily available through the Rear Windows Captioning system, the "undue burden" issue is economic only -- how much can the theaters afford?

The theaters can ask for a rehearing, but because the decision was unanimous and issued very quickly, the judges likely regarded this as pretty much of a "slam-dunk" case, and are very unlikely to grant a rehearing. An appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court is always a possibility, and is somewhat worrisome given that court's general hostility to ADA cases. But the U.S. Supreme Court picks the cases it wants to consider, and the odds are against appealing parties -- only one out of every hundred petitions for review are granted.

Assuming the opinion stands, it will become the law in the Ninth Circuit states of Arizona, California, Nevada, Idaho, Montana, Washington, Oregon, Alaska and Hawaii, and may be persuasive in the rest of the country.

Our Washington case is currently under advisement. We brought that case under Washington law only, because our state law avoided some of the arguments made under ADA. However, the decision can't do anything but help our case.

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

Last Friday, we argued important motions in our Washington movie-captioning case in Seattle Superior Court. Judge Regina Cahan listened attentively, indicated that she knew how important this case is, and indicated that she would need to consider the matter further rather than issue an immediate ruling.

Wash-CAP filed a motion for partial summary judgment. We are asking the judge to rule that the defendant movie theaters -- five corporations that operate multi-screen theaters in King County -- must take all reasonably possible steps to make captioned movies available.

Washington state law requires public accommodations like movie theaters to offer "reasonable accommodations" when treating disabled patrons just like everyone else would not yield full enjoyment of the businesses' goods and services. We asserted -- and the judge seemed to agree -- that those of us whose hearing loss is such that we can't follow a movie dialogue even with the volume-boosting assistive-listening devices that theaters don't fully enjoy the movie, meaning the theaters must provide "reasonable accommodations."

"Reasonable accommodations" are defined in Washington law as those steps "reasonably possible in the circumstances" to make a business' services "accessible." "Services" are defined broadly as "everything" the business offers, which we contend includes the movie soundtrack, and "accessible" is defined in state law as "usable or understandable." Since captions make movies understandable, we argued that under Washington law, the theaters are required to display captioned movies to the extent it is "reasonably possible in the circumstances" for them to do so.

In opposing our motion and asking that the case be thrown out entirely, the attorneys for the theaters offered a broad array of arguments. First, they argued that our state disability law does not regulate the content of goods or services that a business offers, and claimed that their "goods and services" are non-captioned movies. While we can never be certain -- a federal court in Arizona essentially bought that argument -- we don't think it will go far here. We pointed out that captions are prepared in advance for most -- not all, but most -- of the first-run movies that these defendants show, and that those captions are made available on CD-ROM discs furnished to the theaters at no charge. So we argued that in fact the theaters actually have captioned movies, but just refuse to install the equipment necessary to display the captions.

Second -- and this is the argument they really pushed -- the theaters argued that any requirement to undertake captioning should be made by the state Human Rights Commission through a process called agency rulemaking. Because of the emphasis the theaters placed on that argument, we filed a supplemental brief on Tuesday. The judge has accepted our brief, and given the theaters until Wednesday, April 28, to respond.

We expect the judge to issue her ruling shortly after she receives the theater response to our supplemental brief -- possibly the first week in May.

Unless the judge throws the case out, we expect the theaters to begin meaningful settlement negotiations with us. Because what is "reasonably possible in the circumstances" has an economic component to it, we won't really know what each of the defendants can reasonably do until we start looking at some of their economic data. But our objective is to develop a firm and binding commitment and specific schedule for making all of the defendants' theaters accessible to people with hearing loss.

Meanwhile in San Francisco, efforts to resolve the captioning case against the Harkins theater chain were unsuccessful, meaning that the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals will likely go ahead and issue a ruling. That is the case in which the federal trial judge accepted the argument that the theaters' "product" is non-captioned movies. That decision was appealed to the Ninth Circuit.

As reported in prior posts, the appeals court judges ridiculed that argument, although they did not issue a decision. The attorneys for Harkins then asked the court to put a 30-day hold on its deliberations while the parties went to mediation. Fortunately, the mediation was unsuccessful.

The reason that failure of the mediation is fortunate is that if a case settles during the appeal process, the decision of the trial court stays on the books. Our impression from the oral arguments is that the chances of a favorable decision from the Ninth Circuit are high, and we would like to see that process go forward.

While our case in Washington was brought under state law and the Arizona case was decided according to the Americans with Disabilities Act, there may be considerable practical overlap. If theaters across the country are required under ADA to show some captioned movies, their obligation would cease at the point that doing so becomes an "undue burden," which is essentially the flip side of Washington's "reasonably possible in the circumstances." So what we are able to negotiate in Washington State may have some impact on future implementation of an ADA captioning requirement.

And even though our state law is separate and free-standing, a national decision would be of significant practical benefit to us in Washington, because if theaters across the country need to beef up their captioned offerings, there will be far greater demand for the necessary equipment. That could both increase the availability of the equipment and lower the price.

We've got our fingers crossed. 

 

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

.

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

Lawyers for the Harkins movie theater chain, which took the position that they have no obligation to patrons with hearing loss other than to open the doors and let us in, are now waving the white flag of surrender. After getting lambasted by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeal at oral argument, they filed a motion yesterday asking the appeals court to defer issuing a decision in the case while the parties try to reach a settlement.

While it's gratifying to see the opposition acknowledge that their clocks got cleaned by the appeals court, a settlement might not be very good news at all for folks outside of Arizona who want to see captioned movies. That's because if the parties to a lawsuit settle their case, the appeals court will not issue a decision. And without an appeals-court decision, the trial court's opinion remains "on the books" and can still be cited by theater chains other than Harkins who want to claim that they don't have any captioning obligations.

To briefly review, the Arizona Attorney General and the Arizona Center for Disability Law filed suit against the Harkins regional theater chain on behalf of both deaf and blind, claiming that both Arizona state law and the Americans with Disabilities Act required movie theaters to show captioned movies for folks with hearing loss, and audio-described movies for people with vision loss. The captions and descriptions are furnished without charge by the studios -- the theaters must simply install and deploy equipment needed to display those auxiliary aids.

The theaters argued that they have no obligation to do either of those things. They said that all ADA requires is that they treat everyone equally. Captioned movies, they claimed, are a different product than non-captioned movies, and ADA permits them to sell whatever product they choose -- and they don't choose to show captioned movies. The federal district court bought that argument, and issue a truly regrettable decision.

The case then went to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which heard oral argument last month. The judges essentially ridiculed the theater's argument, telling the theater attorneys at one point that "you will lose on this issue ... maybe not this case, but on this issue," and urged the parties to work out an agreement. 

The Harkins attorneys are now asking for the opportunity to do just that. While the judges indicated strongly that they won't accept the theaters' argument, they didn't actually issue a ruling. And the Harkins attorneys are now asking the judges to put their ruling on ice while the parties mediate and try to resolve the case.

While it's always nice to make peace and put an end to litigation, there's a danger involved. Any settlement would just bind the Harkins theaters in Arizona -- not any other theaters in any other states. The bad decision from the trial court, though, would remain on the books to jump up and haunt us at some future time even if the appeals court issues an order saying that the decision is "vacated."

What the appellate court wanted the parties to work out, we think, were the details -- how many screens would be equipped to show captioned films, how often would they be shown, etc. We completely agree that discussion ought to take place, but we think it should take place after the appeals court issues an opinion striking down the trial court's opinion.

We've made our views known to the folks in Arizona. It's their call, of course. But they have done such a great job getting what will be a landmark case this far, we hope they decide to let it play out. 

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

Internet videos are becoming a more important source of information, supplementing and sometimes completely replacing written communication. But too often, the makers of those videos forget about those of us who "hear" with our eyes as well as our ears. Especially with the fairly low-fi computer sound systems, non-captioned videos are often inaccessible to us.

Thanks to the persistence of one of our Wash-CAP members, the Spokane Regional Health District has now captioned all of its informational videos. When you go to the District's web-site, you can choose between the regular menu of videos or the "closed-captioned" menu -- click on the latter, and the videos appear with a "captions" icon that you can turn on or off.

The District originally took the position that written transcripts available upon request would be sufficient. We disagreed. In correspondence with the District, through its Spokane attorneys, we pointed out that Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act requires public agencies to make all of their programs and services accessible to people with hearing loss, and the law further requires them to give primary consideration to the method of accessibility being requested. We also pointed out that the time and expense required to furnish a written transcript would be essentially the same as the time and expense required to prepare captions, so there was little money to be saved by their proposed alternative, and much to be gained in terms of more widespread and timely access by our proposed method.

After considering the alternatives, perhaps including our observation that it would cost them a great deal less to caption the videos than to debate the issue in court, the district complied, and now makes its on-line health advisories accessible to everyone.

The whole business of internet accessibility is an increasing concern. A bill introduced in the House of Representatives, H.R. 3101, would address the problem on a federal level. (Read about H.R. 3101 at the website of the Coalition of Organizations for Accessible Technology, or COAT). Since government agencies have to make all of their "programs and services" accessible, government-provided videos pretty clearly must be captioned. 

The great gap at the moment deals with on-line videos created by private businesses, who are not required to make their programs and services accessible, but only their places of business. Courts are divided on whether a website where goods are sold can be classified as a place of business for purposes of disability laws. The federal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has said that places of business are brick-and-mortar places only.

However, a federal district court in California has qualified the Ninth Circuit's rule somewhat by saying that if the inaccessibility of the website actually hinders one's ability to shop at the brick-and-mortar store, that may be a violation of federal disability law. We believe that logic should apply, at the very least, to on-line instructional videos for products sold at the brick-and-mortar store

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

Seattle's Paramount Theatre, which pioneered open-captioned performances in the Northwest, will offer three captioned productions in the next six weeks.

This Sunday, Jan. 24, at 6:30 p.m., the captioned production will be Xanadu, a roller-skating pop-rock confection best known as a 1980s movie starring Olivia Newton-John. The music comes from Jeff Lynne, the under-appreciated leader of the Electric Light Orchestra. (You'll recognize the tunes even if you don't recognize the name). Tickets are available on-line at a special price of $38.50.

On Valentine's Day, Sunday Feb. 14, again at 6:30 p.m., the captioned production will be Annie, the musical re-creation of the long-running comic strip about a red-headed moppet and her dog Sandy. It was the longest-running comic strip ever, and one of the longer-running shows on Broadway, logging well over 2,000 performances. Again, tickets are available on-line for $38.50.

Then on Sunday, March 7, at 6:30 p.m., Paramount will do a captioned version of Chicago, a musical originally choreographed by Bob Fosse which was made into an Academy Award-winning movie and which is now back on stage. Here's a link to on-line ticket-purchasing, and the price again is $38.50.

Paramount is offering two other Broadway musicals in the Spring -- Dreamgirls in April and Fiddler on the Roof in May. Dreamgirls, based essentially on the rise to fame of The Supremes, became a critically acclaimed movie starring Beyonce Knowles and Jennifer Hudson, while Fiddler is the much-beloved recreation of life in a Jewish shtetl in the last century. No word yet on whether those productions will have a captioned performance, but assuming Paramount adheres to the pattern of captioning the last Sunday evening performance, the dates would be April 11 for Dreamgirls and May 30 for Fiddler.

For the open-captioned performances, the captions are prepared in advance, and are displayed on a small reader-board placed in front of the stage on the right edge. Tickets purchased through the open-caption links will be in an area where both the captions and the on-stage action can be seen with minimal head-turning. Paramount began offering one captioned performance of each of its Broadway offerings in August of 2008 at the request of the Washington State Communication Access Project (Wash-CAP). Since then, Seattle's 5th Avenue Theatre and Seattle Repertory Theatre have also begun offering captioned performances.

 

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

A federal appeals court in San Francisco heard oral arguments on Jan. 13 about whether movie theaters must offer services like captioning or audio descriptions so that those of us with sensory losses can enjoy the movies. And the arguments of one theater chain that all it needs to do is open the doors and let us in was, to put it mildly, poorly received.

Those of us who have spent a lot of time in appellate courts are usually pretty cautious about trying to predict a case's outcome based on the questions the judges ask. But there are sometimes a few clues, or "tells" that can indicate that, just maybe, things aren't going your way.

 

1) When the judges start making the other side's argument for them, that's a pretty good "tell."

 

2) When the judges say your clients are "being jerks," that's a pretty good "tell."

 

3) When the judges suggest that "someday," people will be laughing at your argument, then when you don't back off, proceed to do so, that's a pretty good "tell."

 

Well, I'm pleased to report that all of those things happened to the attorneys for the Harkins theater chain when the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals heard arguments about whether the Americans with Disabilities Act requires movie theaters to show captioned (and audio-described) movies.

 

As you may know, the Arizona Attorney General's Office sued the Harkins theater chain, claiming that the business violated both ADA and Arizona state law by failing to show captioned and described movies. The AG was not suggesting that the theaters themselves had to provide the captions or descriptions, but only that they need to install the equipment necessary to show the captions and descriptions provided by the studios.

 

The theaters took the position that ADA does not regulate the contents of their products or services, and that they offer non-captioned movies. "We have the right to choose what services we provide, and that is our choice," said the attorney for the theaters. "We let everyone come into our theaters and see our (non-captioned) movies, and that is what ADA requires us to do."

 

The AG's office, on the other hand, said that captions are the kind of "auxiliary aid and service" that the ADA requires to enable people with hearing and vision losses to gain the "full enjoyment" of the businesses' offerings.

 

The judges basically said flat-out that they thought the theater argument is preposterous. Alex Kozinski, the chief judge, said, "What if we took the position that this building is a building with steps, and if someone in a wheelchair wants to come in, they can find somebody to carry them?"

 

Kozinksi went on, "Actually, that case happened, and some lawyer argued that being able to crawl up the steps was good enough. Today, people are laughing at that argument, and I wouldn't be surprised if in a few years, people are laughing at your argument."

 

The attorney didn't back down. And the judges started laughing.

"Captions just let them enjoy the same movie that everybody else sees," Kozinski said. "I don't know why you don't want to do this."

 

Kozinski went on to say that at best, it's only a matter of time before movie theaters have to comply. "You are going to lose," he said. "You might not even lose this case, but you will lose someday. Why don't you get out ahead and do the right thing instead of being jerks?"

 

Nor were the judges impressed with any argument about cost. I asked for CART for the hearing, which was provided. "That wasn't in our budget," Kozinski said, "but we pulled it together in a day. With what theaters are doing with 3D, the cost of this (providing equipment to show captions) is just a drop in the bucket."

 

Now I don't want to suggest that we're going to see every movie captioned at any time in the future. The judges seemed pretty clear in their view that open-captioning can change the moviegoing experience for hearing patrons, and that the interests of those patrons must be balanced against the benefit to those of us who need captions. I think it's quite clear that those theaters that offer open captions, visible to everyone in the audience, would not be required to caption every movie.

The judges also recognized that the pending change-over to digital display may mean that some things that can't be done now can be done in the future, and that today's captioning equipment may become obsolete. But the judges said issues of that nature should be worked out by the parties themselves.

 

In fact, that's just what the judges suggested. "You've got your general counsel here," Kozinski told the Harkins attorney, "and the AG's office is here. Why don't you just go down to the cafeteria and work out a schedule today?"

 

I would anticipate a "quick" decision from the court, but "quick" from an appellate court probably still means four to six months.

 

Meanwhile, the attorneys representing the movie theaters in our Washington case were in the audience. They asked me afterwards whether we could just put our case on ice for awhile, until the court rules on Harkins. They noted that we're "going to spend a lot of money" making motions in our case.

 

I said I wasn't interested in a stay. What I suggested instead is that they basically just throw in the towel on any argument that they don't have to do anything, and sit down and negotiate what and when they have to do things. Their response: "we'll report to our clients about what happened today, and get back to you."

 

The bottom line -- circle today's date on your calendar. This was the day that the movie theaters' arguments that "we don't have to do anything" crumbled.

 

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

Next week in San Francisco, on Jan. 13, a federal appeals court will hear oral arguments in a case out of Arizona that may determine once and for all whether movie theaters may be required to show captioned movies to comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Then two months later, on March 12, a superior court judge in Seattle will hear arguments over whether movie captioning may be required by the Washington state Law against Discrimination.

The Arizona Attorney General's Office brought an action against that state's Harkins theater chain contending that under ADA, theaters must show movies that are captioned for people with hearing loss, and that contain audio descriptions for people with vision loss. The AG's office didn't say that the theaters had to create the captions or descriptions -- those are contained on a computer disc that comes with many, although not all, first-run movies. The AG's office was simply stating that Harkins must equip at least some of its theaters to actually display those captions and provide the audio descriptions.

Harkins argued that it had no such obligation. It said that ADA does not regulate the content of goods sold or services offered, and argued that the "goods" or "services" it offers are non-captioned movies. The federal judge in Arizona agreed, and the case is now on appeal.

A number of other lawsuits have been filed requesting movie captioning, with mixed results. But the Harkins case is the watershed event for a couple of reasons.

First, the federal courts of appeal are the second-highest courts in the land, right below the U.S. Supreme Court. This will be the first movie-captioning case to reach the appeals-court level. The decision will be legally binding only in the Ninth Circuit states of Arizona, Nevada, California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana, Hawaii and Alaska. But as a practical matter, most federal courts will generally follow the first appellate-court decision to address a particular issue. So the case could essentially establish a national rule.

Second, if the decision is upheld, we can anticipate all sorts of other businesses arguing that by the same logic, they should not have to provide captions. If a movie theater's "product" is non-captioned movies, then surely, live theaters can argue that their "product" is non-captioned drama, and universities can argue that their "product" is non-captioned lectures.

Needless to say, we think the trial-court decision is profoundly wrong. Wash-CAP filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the Arizona case, and we've been in contact with the Arizona attorneys about the oral arguments. I'll be in San Francisco Wednesday listening to the arguments, and will file a blog entry about them. It generally takes an appellate court from six months to two years or more to announce a decision after oral argument, but sometimes -- not always, but sometimes -- the questions the judges ask at oral argument can give one an idea of what they are thinking.

The arguments will begin at about 11 a.m. Wednesday at the Browning Courthouse, 95 7th Street in San Francisco. We've worked with the court to have the proceedings captioned, and would encourage anyone in the area who is interested to attend.

While the Arizona case will likely establish what ADA requires, it won't directly impact the case Wash-CAP filed in King County Superior Court under our state law, which in many ways is far superior to the ADA, particularly for people with hearing loss. Our complaint claims that under state law, theaters must take those steps "reasonably possible in the circumstances" to make their movie soundtracks understandable. As with the Arizona case, the theaters deny having any such obligation.

We've worked cooperatively with the attorneys for the King County movie theaters to develop a set of stipulated facts. They will then file a motion claiming that they have no obligation, and we will file a cross-motion claiming that they do. Our case is scheduled for oral argument before Judge Regina Cahan in the King County main courthouse, 516 3d Avenue, at 10:00 a.m. on Friday, March 12.

 

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

Seattle's Paramount Theatre has changed the date for presenting the captioned versions of its Christmas show, the Radio City Christmas Spectacular  featuring New York's famous Radio City Rockettes.

The captioned performance will be Wednesday, Dec. 30, at 7:30 p.m. 

Tickets are available at a special price of $38.50. Here is a link for ordering the tickets on line. https://www.stgpresents.org/oc/radiocity.asp

For those of you who haven't yet attended a captioned theater performance, the dialogue and song lyrics are displayed on a portable reader-board placed in front of the stage. A block of seats is made available in an area of the theater that enables patrons to see both the on-stage action and the captions with minimal need to move our heads and eyes. The captions are prepared in advance, so they are error-free.

 

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

Word had spread about the successes we've enjoyed in Washington through the Washington State Communication Access Project, (Wash-CAP), our organized group advocacy on behalf of people with hearing loss. Last weekend, I met with a group of folks in Oregon who are interested in forming a similar organization, tentatively called the Oregon Communication Access Project.

The meeting was organized by Clark Anderson, a retired hospital administrator from the Eugene area. Clark brought together a number of Oregonians who have been actively working on behalf of people with hearing loss. Their general consensus -- it makes sense to work as a group.

The overall objective in Oregon, as in Washington, will be to actually implement the provisions of federal disability laws that guarantee access to public places to people with hearing loss. The legal landscape in Oregon isn't quite as favorable -- while the federal Americans with Disabilities Act applies, Oregon does not have a state law like Washington's that goes beyond ADA's requirements.

We talked about the need for strategic planning and a systematic approach to implementing those plans. We talked about how our initial efforts to make live theater accessible in the Seattle area led us to learn about available technologies and providers, so that we could be resource people for businesses that want to reach out to people with hearing loss but aren't sure how to do it.

As was the case in Washington, the feeling in Oregon was that it is important to begin dealing with situations where the business's obligations are pretty clear-cut, and the advocacy efforts are therefore likely to succeed. In that light, efforts to make live theater dialogue and announcements at sports facilities understandable seemed particularly promising. Because of that, the early focus is likely to be on improving access at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival,  the Portland Center for the Performing Arts Broadway series and other major live theaters in Portland, the Hult Center for the Performing Arts in Eugene, and professional and college sports venues in Portland, Eugene and Corvallis.

This is great news for both Oregon and Washington. Working in two continiguous states will help generate awareness of the needs of the hearing-loss population and how those needs can be accommodated. Many people in both states cross the Columbia regularly to patronize attractions in the neighboring state.

I'll continue to advise OR-CAP on some of the technical details of getting started -- things like the mechanics of incorporation, the necessary corporate documents and the public outreach effort that is required. We hope they may benefit by what has worked well for us in Washington, and perhaps benefit just as much from things that we might have done a bit differently. We anticipate that by mid-January, the Oregon organization will be up and running, and opening doors there for those of us with hearing loss.

 

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

Thanks to the good efforts of a number of Seattle's live theaters, those of us with hearing loss won't need to have a holiday season full of nothing but silent nights, as we'll have a menu of captioned performances available to us.

Tomorrow, Dec. 4, Seattle Repertory Theatre is offering a captioned performance of "Equivocation," a play in which Shakespeare is the principal character, not the author. King James has commissioned Shakespeare to write a play about a plot to assissinate the king, but when Shakespeare finds out that the "official" version of events isn't accurate, he has to choose between his artistic integrity or possibly his head. To ensure seats from where the captions will be visible, email the box office, boxoffice@seattlerep.org.

On Sunday, December 27, Seattle's Fifth Avenue Theatre will present a captioned performance of the holiday standby White Christmas, the Irving Berlin favorite. Fifth Avenue is offering tickets to the captioned performances for the special price of $37.50. Again, the best way to ensure that you'll be seated in the right spot is to email the Fifth Avenue box office, ticketing@5thavenue.org.

Finally, the New Year really will get kicked off on Jan. 3, 2010, when Seattle's Paramount Theatre presents the Rockettes and the Radio City Christmas Spectacular at 5 p.m. It appears that Paramount has changed its website design, and in the process, we've lost the on-line order button for captioned performances. For now, other than calling or visiting the box office, the best bet for those of us who don't use telephones easily might simply be to contact Mason Sherry, the theater manager directly by email, masons@stgpresents.org. Mason has been a terrific supporter of Paramount's captioning efforts, and he will find a way to let us order online tickets.

The captioning at all three theaters is being done by c2net from Boston, which converts the script into text form in advance, then displays the captions on a portable reader board visible from a bloc of seats set aside for those who request them.  The captioning effort has been partially funded by the Theatre Development Fund from New York City.

The captioning efforts were undertaken after requests from the Washington State Communication Access Project (Wash-CAP), a non-profit membership corporation whose purpose is to improve access to Washington's public places for people with hearing loss.

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

The Washington State Ferries have issued a request for proposals for a visual paging system that will display in captioned form the announcements made on board WSF's vessels and at its terminals.

The request -- a legally required step for a state agency to make a significant purchase -- asks potential vendors to give specifications and quote prices for what it calls a "voice-to-text visual paging system modeled after the visual paging system at San Francisco International Airport."

Deadline for vendor responses is January 7 of 2010, and WSF expects to award a contract on February 1. (Read the full document here).

Numerous announcements are currently made by public-address systems on all of WSF's vessels and at its terminals, but those announcements are difficult for hard-of-hearing people to understand, and are totally inaccessible to deaf passengers. Both state and federal law require government entities such as the state ferry system to make communications effective to people with hearing loss.

According to the bid documents, the  system "must be capable of converting regular voice messages from a variety of assigned vessel crew and terminal personnel." Both routine and specialized announcements (such a information about cars with lights left on) will be displayed in text form on television-type monitors or on reader-board devices.

The purchased system will be installed first for a six-month trial run on the two large boats that service the Seattle-Bainbridge Island route, and at the Seattle and Bainbridge Island terminals. If the system proves reliable, it will then be expanded throughout the WSF system.

 WSF's actions are being taken to resolve a lawsuit filed against it by the Washington State Communication Access Project (Wash-CAP), a Washington non-profit membership corporation which has the objective of making Washington's public places accessible to people with hearing loss.

WSF operates one of the world's largest ferry systems, serving more than 23 million passengers annually. With studies indicating that almost 8 percent of the adult population have a hearing loss serious enough to interfere with their ability to understand speech, this system should benefit almost two million riders a year. 

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

At a recent Seattle meeting of interested organizations, Washington State Ferries explained how it intends to convert its public-address announcements made on its vessels and at its terminals into text form, then to display those announcements to make them accessible to patrons with hearing loss.

The basic system will be modeled after the system used at San Francisco Airport, where all gate information and passenger pages are displayed in text on some 80 screens visible throughout the airport. Here are the notes from that meeting, as compiled by WSF.

The San Francisco Airport has a central communications center, where all messages originate. That allows the messages to be dictated by a very few speakers, which enables the information to be transcribed into text using a software program, without any additional human input. Because the WSF messages will originate on the individual vessels, a centralized system may not work in this application. WSF is therefore thinking about how to standardize the messages in such a way that vessel crews only have to type in the specifics, like the license number of a car or the name of a person.

The feedback from representatives of organizations that serve people with hearing loss was overall quite favorable, although people with both hearing and vision impairments noted that the proposed system could still leave some access gaps.

After evaluating feeback from the user groups, WSF will formulate a Request For Proposals, and follow state purchasing requirements to obtain and install a captioning system on the Bainbridge vessels and at the Seattle and Bainbridge terminals for a six-month trial. If the system performs satisfactorily, it will then be installed system-wide.

There are too many unknowns to predict with any certainty when the systems will be installed. The target to install the test system is the latter half of 2010.

WSF is undertaking this effort to resolve a lawsuit brought against it by the Washington State Communication Access Project, which alleged that WSF was violating the Washington State Law Against Discrimination by failing to communicate effectively with hearing-impaired patrons. After the suit was filed, the Attorney General's office worked smoothly with Wash-CAP to come to an agreed order implementing the communications improvements.

Washington State Ferries is the nation's largest ferry system, carrying some 26 million passengers annually. Assuming the prevalence of hearing loss among WSF passengers is similar to that in the nation as a whole, as many as 4 million passengers will benefit from a system-wide implementation of the agreement.

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

After a year of correspondence with Wash-CAP, Seattle Arts and Lectures is making its popular Benaroya Hall presentations by prominent authors significantly accessible to patrons with hearing loss by captioning five of its 2009-10 events.

Captioned presentations include two Pulitzer Prize  winners, an award-winning screenwriter, two food-and-travel authors, and a medical journalist whose work is profoundly influencing the national debate about health-care reform.

The captioned schedule is as follows:

Oct. 7, 2009 -- Annie Proulx, Pulitzer-Prize winner for The Shipping News and author of Brokeback Mountain, a short story that became a much-praised and controversial movie.

Dec. 1, 2009 -- Richard Price, author of the novel Clockers, which bears a strong thematic resemblance to the award-winning HBO television series The Wire, to which Price contributed,  and screenwriter for many other movies.

Jan. 12, 2010 -- Jane and Michael Stern, food and travel writers devoted to America's back roads and to the unique and surprisingly excellent food one can find there.

March 9, 2010 -- Michael Chabon, Pulitzer-Prize winner for The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay and author of The Yiddish Policeman's Union, whose work consistently draws rave critical reviews.

May 3, 2010 -- Dr. Atul Gawande, a practicing surgeon and journalist, whose writing on health-care costs and quality have gained wide influence inside the Obama Administration.

All lectures are at 7:30 p.m. at Benaroya Hall in downtown Seattle. Because the captions will be visible from throughout the auditorium, patrons who want to see the captions will have the same array of ticket prices and options as all other patrons.

Single-event tickets go on sale Aug. 24. We have asked SAL to consider offering a season subscription to all of the captioned events.

SAL's decision to make the captions visible to all raises an interesting question. On the one hand, we appreciate being able to sit wherever we choose. On the other hand, because of the equipment required, universally visible captioning is considerably more expensive than captioning visible from only a portion of the auditorium, meaning that fewer events can be captioned. So the question is, which is better? We hope to get some feedback on that question as we work with SAL to plan future seasons.

By adding captions to its array of accommodations, SAL joins Seattle's Paramount, 5th Avenue and Seattle Repertory Theatres, as well as the Seattle Mariners and Seattle Seahawks, in making its offerings available to those of us who have a significant hearing loss but who communicate orally rather than through sign language. Those captioning efforts have been instigated at the request of and in cooperation with the Washington State Communication Access Project (Wash-CAP) in furtherance of Wash-CAP's objective of making Washington State a national model of accessibility for people with hearing loss. 

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

Seattle Repertory Theatre will make much of its 2009-10 season accessible to people with hearing loss by offering captioned performances of its four at the Bagley Wright Theatre, Rep's main stage.

The productions and caption dates are:

39 Steps -- Thursday, Oct. 1

Equivocation -- Thursday, Dec. 3

Glengrarry Glen Ross -- Thursday,  Feb. 11

Fences -- Thursday, April 1

Tickets will go on sale Aug. 21. Seattle Rep marketing director Katie Jackman plans to send us an email link that we can post on this website to enable them to keep track of how many ticket purchases come from our readers and members.

The caption-area tickets will cost $35 each, significantly less than Rep's normal pricing of $41 to $48 for seats in that area.

Seattle Rep joins Seattle's Paramount and 5th Avenue theaters in offering one captioned performance of each of its dramatic productions. The captions, prepared in advance, are displayed in synch with the performance on a portable reader board. All three theaters have engaged c2net out of Boston to do that captioning.

Rep's initiation of captioning comes in response to requests from the Washington State Communication Access Project, and is one more small step towards our objective of making Washington's public places accessible to people with hearing loss. Wash-CAP was also responsible for instigating the captioned performances at Paramount and 5th Avenue.

Seattle Rep's captioning program is being funded in part by a grant from the Theatre Development Fund from New York City, which has also provided start-up funding for Paramount and 5th Avenue. Three of TDF's eight access grants this year have gone to Seattle theaters, a focus that TDF Accessibility Programs Director Lisa Carling says is the result of Wash-CAP's advocacy within the Puget Sound theater community.

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

Seattle's Fifth Avenue Theatre this week released its schedule of captioned performances for the 2009-10 season.

The first captioned performance will be "Catch Me If You Can," a new musical version of the Leonardo di Caprio movie based on the truth-is-stranger-than-fiction biography of Frank Abegnale, an imposter-embezzler who used his gift of gab to pose as a professional in a number of fields, and made off with millions in the process.  The captioned performance will be Wednesday, August 12, at 7:30 p.m.

The rest of the schedule is:

"Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat," Friday, Oct. 23, 8 p.m.

"White Christmas," Sunday, Dec. 27, 1:30 p.m.

"South Pacific," (the revival by Intiman Theatre's Bartlett Sher that won seven Tony Awards), Saturday, Feb. 20, 2 p.m.

"Legally Blonde," another movie-turned-musical, Friday, March 5, 8 p.m.

"On the Town," Friday, April 23, 8 p.m.

"Candide," Wednesday, June 2, 7:30 p.m.

Fifth Avenue is undertaking captioned performances at the request of the Washinton State Communication Access Project (Wash-CAP), a non-profit membership corporation whose goal is to make Washington's public places accessible to people with hearing loss. The captioning arrangement will be very similar to Seattle's Paramount Theatre -- a portable reader-board will be placed to one side of the stage, and the captions will be scrolled in synch with the performance.

Fifth Avenue will sell two tickets to the captioned section at a discounted price of $37. Buyers of those discounted tickets can buy two additional tickets at the regular price.

Season subscriptions to the captioned performances are available. You can get the details on the "Accessibility" page of Fifth Avenue's website, http://www.5thavenue.org/accessibility/.

For those who can't attend the special captioned performances, Fifth Avenue will offer scripts in illuminated binders at all performances.

Fifth Avenue joins Seattle's Paramount Theatre in becoming accessible to people with significant hearing losses by offering one captioned performance of each of its Broadway-type productions. Paramount's schedule for the remainder of 2009 is available on a prior post.

 

 

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

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.

 

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

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.

 

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

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.

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

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.

 

 

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

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.

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

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.

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

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. 

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

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.

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

The Washington State Communication Access Project (Wash-CAP) filed a lawsuit last week in Seattle against six owners of multi-plex theaters asking the theaters to show more captioned movies.

The 33-page complaint names as defendants three national theater chains -- AMC, Regal and Carmike -- two local multiplex owners -- Kirkland Cinemas and Lincoln Square cinemas -- and Landmark, a company that specializes in owning and operating historic theaters.

At present, both the AMC and Regal chains show some captioned movies, but relatively few. AMC shows first-run movies at seven different complexes with a total of 72 screens in King County, but has equipped only four of those screens to show captioned movies. Regal also has seven multiplex complexes in King County showing first-run movies on a total of 83 screens, but again, has equipped only four to show captioned movies. The other four defendants show no captioned films.

The complaint notes that of the 33 first-run films shown on January 17 -- intended to represent a typical Saturday -- 26 of them were available in captioned format, but only five of them were actually shown with captions. 

"While captioning is widely available, movie exhibitors, specifically including these defendants, have in general made only minimal use of captioning, if any use at all. It is that failure to use available technology, rather than the absence of technology, that has made movies generally inaccessible" to the hearing-loss population, and frequently to their spouses, families and friends, the complaint states.

Because of the sparse use of captioning technology, people with hearing loss who need captions to understand a movie sound track have fewer movies available to them, at far fewer locations and at far fewer times than do fully hearing patrons. Wash-CAP contends that such different treatment violates the Washington Law Against Discrimination and its implementing regulations, which require that public places like movies make their services understandable to patrons with disabilities like hearing loss.

The case is scheduled to go trial in July of 2010.

   

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

The Washington State Communication Access Project (Wash-CAP) and Seattle Fifth Avenue Theatre have amicably resolved their lawsuit, and signed off on a settlement that will bring captioned theater to that venue beginning this season.

The agreement calls for Fifth Avenue to offer at least one captioned performance of each of its seven productions during the 2009-10 season. Because Fifth Avenue has not finalized its schedule of productions, it hasn't identified dates for the captioned performances. However, the agreement calls for at least some captioned performances to be on the weekend, and some to be during the evening. Fifth Avenue will offer season subscriptions to the captioned performances. Fifth Avenue will set up a specific link on its website to order tickets for the captioned performances.

Wash-CAP and Fifth Avenue tentatively agreed to such a resolution last August, and have been working out the mechanics and the details since.

Fifth Avenue will continue to offer Assistive Listening Devices, which benefit patrons with mild hearing losses, and lighted scripts for patrons with more serious losses. Those will be offered at all performances. The combination of lighted scripts and captioned performances, along with sign-language interpreted performances, makes Fifth Avenue the most accessible live theater in Western Washington.

At Wash-CAP's request, Seattle's Paramount Theatre began offering one captioned performance of each of its Broadway-type offerings beginning last August, and has presented four captioned performances to date. The captions, containing both dialogue and notations about sound effects, are prepared in advance and presented in synch with the performance by c2net of Boston, which will also caption the Fifth Avenue shows.  

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

The battle lines are being drawn in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, as that court  will decide whether the Americans with Disabilities Act requires movies to be captioned, and thereby become accessible to the hearing-loss population.

As we noted in an earlier post, a federal judge in Arizona ruled last spring that showing moves with captions would alter the "product" sold by movie theaters, and that because ADA does not regulate product content, the law therefore did not require theaters to show captioned movies. That case was appealed -- the first movie-captioning litigation to reach the appellate court level.

Generally speaking, the decision of the first federal court of appeals to decide an issue becomes a national precedent, so unless the United State Supreme Court were to step in or Congress were to intervene, the Ninth Circuit decision will essentially become the national rule.

The Washington State Communication Access Project (Wash-CAP) and a number of national organizations filed friend-of-the-court briefs arguing that the Arizona decision should be reversed. While our brief did argue that the Arizona court badly misconstrued the ADA, we also tried to speak from the perspective of people with hearing loss, and explain why captions are so important to us. 

The excellent brief from the Arizona Attorney General's office laid out the legal arguments, and those arguments were further fleshed out in friend-of-the-court briefs from the Alexander Graham Bell Association for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing, the National Association of the Deaf, and the national Disability Rights Network.

The defendant movie theaters and their friend-of-the-court allies will file briefs arguing for affirmance of the Arizona decision. Given the stately pace at which the law operates, we don't expect a final decision until 2010 at the earliest.

Although the NInth Circuit will decide what ADA requires of movie theaters, those theaters are also subject to state law, and the Ninth Circuit decision won't affect those obligations. Wash-CAP is considering whether our exceptionally broad Washington State Law Against Discrimination might provide a separate basis for seeking expanded movie captioning in our state.  

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

Late last month, football fans with hearing loss scored big in the "other Washington" when a federal judge in Maryland ruled that the federal Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) requires the Washington Redskins football team to caption all public-address announcements made in the stadium.

This precedent-setting ruling is the first ADA case involving sports stadiums, and the judge recognized its importance, saying, "there are hundreds of stadiums in the United States, and the number of disabled people who desire to enjoy professional sports is constantly increasing as the population grows."

The Redskins had argued that the service they offer to the public is simply the presentation of a football game, and that the information and entertainment delivered over the public-address system was immaterial. The court disagreed. In language that makes us want to stand up and cheer -- even to do a wave -- the judge said,

"Defendants provide more than a football game; they also provide public address announcements, advertisements, music, and other aural information to hearing fans at FedExField. Presumably Defendants provide this aural information to hearing fans for a reason. This aural information is a good, service, facility, privilege, advantage, or accommodation. Without some form of auxiliary aid or service, plaintiffs would not have equal access to this information. On the face of the statute, the Court believes and concludes that Title III of the ADA requires Defendants to provide deaf and hard of hearing fans equal access to the aural information broadcast over the stadium bowl public address system at FedExField, which includes music with lyrics, play information, advertisements, referee calls, safety/emergency information, and other announcements."

Based on the persuasive power of that decision, and because Washington State law is even more specifically protective of people with hearing loss than is federal law, the Washington State Communication Access Project (Wash-CAP) has sent letters to the Seattle Mariners and Safeco Field and to the Seattle Seahawks at Qwest Field asking them to institute captioning beginning no later than the 2009 seasons.

Those letters continue Wash-CAP's campaign to make Washington's public places accessible to those of us with hearing loss. We are working in 2008 to make live theater accessible. To date, the Paramount and Fifth Avenue Theatres in Seattle have agreed to offer captioned performances -- Paramount is doing so already and Fifth Avenue will begin doing so in 2009. We have begun dialogues with Seattle Rep, Intiman Theatre and Seattle Arts and Lectures. We are also engaged in what we hope will be productive discussions with Washington State Ferries that will lead to captioning the announcements made aboard WSF vessels and at WSF terminals.

We invite anyone interested in making Washington's public places more accessible to those with hearing loss to join Wash-CAP. Membership is free for the asking; simply send an email to john@wash-cap.com with the word "membership" in the subject line. Wash-CAP will then keep you posted on our efforts to expand access for those of us with hearing loss.   

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

We received the 'official' word today from Paramount that the captioned performance of Phantom of the Opera will take place Wednesday, Oct. 1, and that the captioned performance of the recent Tony-winning sensation Spring Awakening will be on Sunday, Oct. 19. Special ticket prices will be offered for both performances.
 
I've attached the press release from Paramount announcing plans to caption their full season of Broadway offerings. You will note that Wash-CAP isn't mentioned, but that's fine -- if we get the results, we'll happily let the folks who are doing as we ask take the credit.
 
Here are the links we can use to purchase our tickets for the two shows.
 
https://purchase.theparamount.com/accessible/phantom.asp
https://purchase.theparamount.com/accessible/springawakening.asp
 
We hope to see everyone there Wednesday and again on the 19th -- and tell all your friends as well. The best way to ensure the future of captioned theater in Seattle is to patronize the performances.
 
 

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

Seattle's Paramount Theatre has agreed to expand its open-captioned performances to include its entire lineup of Broadway shows.

The captioned performance of Phantom of the Opera will take place on Wednesday, Oct. 1. The captioned performance of Spring Awakening will be Sunday evening, Oct. 19.

Paramount has not yet furnished us with information about ticket prices, or about the best way to order tickets. However, because it has posted the dates for the captioned performances, we want to let the hearing loss population of Washington know in time to make their plans. We will post another announcement immediately when we learn more details.

After considerable discussion with the Washington State Communication Access Project (Wash-CAP), Paramount offered what we believe to be the first open-captioned theater performance in Washington on August 10, when it offered a captioned performance of A Chorus Line.

The captions were prepared in advance, then displayed on a portable readerboard in synch with the performance. The captions were principally visible from the seats at the orchestra level on the right of the stage. Paramount reserved a block of seats for those who specifically requested seats where the captions would be visible, and over 50 people specifically asked for those seats.

Like Chorus Line, Phanton is a familiar part of the Broadway canon. Paramount's presentation of a captioned performance will make it accessible perhaps for the first time to those of us with hearing loss. Spring Awakening is a new production -- a rock-era reworking of an early 20th Century German drama about coming of age in a repressive society. It was a breakout hit on Broadway last year, and swept the Tony Awards.

We're hoping the audience for captioned theater continues to build. As one of the patrons at Chorus Line put it, "for the first time, when my family goes out for dinner after the show, I can be part of the conversation about the play." That statement reflects Wash-CAP's mission of enriching the lives not only of those of us with hearing loss, but of our families and loved ones, by enabling us to participate in the hearing world. 

 

 

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

After initially pleading poverty, and after Wash-CAP filed a court action, Seattle's 5th Avenue Theatre has now agreed tentatively that it will offer captioned performances beginning in the 2009-2010 season.

5th Avenue, which chiefly offers Broadway-type musicals, had said on several occasions that captioning would constitute an "undue burden," and was therefore not required under either state or federal law. That answer was unacceptable to us in light of the fact that 5th Avenue's annual budget is over $19 million, and 5th Avenue said captioning one performance of each of its seven seasonal productions would cost "almost" $14,000. Our view was that if spending that amounts to less than one-tenth of one percent of the annual budget is an "undue" burden, then captioning would never be warranted.

After we filed suit, though, 5th Avenue said it would offer captioned performances (at least one per production) starting in 2009. While we couldn't understand exactly why the theater couldn't begin offering captions immediately, the practical reality was that our trial date wasn't until January of 2010, so 5th Avenue was offering us more than we could get in court. That being the case, we agreed in concept, believing that an imperfect compromise made more sense than a "perfect" trial.

There are still some details to be negotiated, but the attorneys for 5th Avenue have indicated that they don't believe those details will be insurmountable.

Before suit was filed, 5th Avenue had agreed to provide scripts in lighted binders, which will let those with hearing loss read along with the performance. While we thought that was a significantly less useful accomodation than real-time captioning, it is better than nothing. We have asked 5th Avenue to continue offering the lighted scripts, giving hearing-impaired patrons the option of either attending the designated captioned performance(s), or attending a different performance using the lighted scripts. We believe that combination will make 5th Avenue one of the more accessible theaters in the country for people with hearing loss.

Wash-CAP continues its focus on live theaters in Washington. We are continuing to work with The Paramount Theatre and with the various venues at Seattle Centre, where captioned performances have been offered in the past at our request. We will update this website as future captioned performances are confirmed.

 

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

Captioned theater made its Washington State debut Sunday evening, Aug. 10, when Seattle's Paramount Theatre presented a captioned version of A Chorus Line.

The captions, provided and operated by the Caption Coalition (c2net) of Boston, were displayed on a portable message board set up in front of the stage in synch with the performance. David Chu, founder and CEO of c2net, was on hand to personally oversee the preparation and display of the captions. Paramount Theatre set aside a generous block of 80 tickets in the right-orchestra section of the theater, from where the captions were clearly visible.

Despite less than a month's notice, summer vacations and little public advertising (other than what we were able to do on this website and through Washington's hearing-loss organizations), we had over 50 people request seats in the caption area. Paramount Theatre manager Mason Sherry said afterwards that he thought the performance went well, and seemed optimistic about future captioned performances.

The news from Seattle's other major theater, though, has not been good. 5th Avenue Theatre, which bills itself as Seattle's largest theatrical employer, has declined to provide captioned performances, claiming that doing so would constitute an "undue burden." 5th Avenue said that captioning one performance of each of the seven productions it presents in any one season would cost $14,000, and it claims that it can't make room in an annual budget of some $19 million to provide for captioning.

If captioning were declared to be an "undue burden," 5th Avenue would not be required to provide it. However, in order to claim that providing an accommodation like captioning constitutes an undue burden, the facility must show that it can't reduce expenses, can't expect a revenue increase from the expected new audience, can't raise enough revenue by increasing admission charges to everyone, and can't find a sponsor.

Because 5th Avenue did not provide any information to substantiate its claim that captioning would constitute an undue burden, the Washington State Communication Access Project (Wash-CAP) filed suit last week in state court in Seattle. Our complaint did not ask for money damages, but asked that 5th Avenue provide captioned performances like the performance provided by Paramount. Trial is not scheduled to occur until January of 2010, but we hope to work out a settlement with 5th Avenue well before that date.

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

We've been in constant touch with Seattle's Paramount Theatre representatives over the last 24 hours. We're happy to report that what was yesterday a pretty chaotic situation (which chaos was responsible for yesterday's semi-snarky post) has now been clarified, and it now appears that captioned live theater will indeed be available to Seattle audiences.

Paramount is setting aside 40 tickets for the captioned performance of A Chorus Line on Aug. 10 at 6:30 p.m. Tickets are available in that block at a discounted price of $38.

To get those tickets, call the Paramount box office at 206-467-5510 and state that you want tickets in the caption section. You can also use the Ticketmaster TTY line, 800-725-6244. Given the brief time between now and the performance, it hasn't been possible to arrange for on-line purchases of these tickets with Ticketron.

Anyone who pulled the trigger yesterday based on the information that was then available (including me) and bought tickets outside the caption section can exchange them by mailing the physical tickets back to Paramount, and explaining that they were purchased outside the caption section before learning about the block-seating arrangement..

Like many theaters, Paramount does have assistive listening devices (ALDs), and does offer sign-language interpreted performances. Unitl now, though, they have offered nothing for those of us who don't hear well enough to follow dramatic dialogue or sung lyrics even with the ALDs, but who don't use sign language. We've found that there is relatively little awareness that people in that hearing "gap" exist as a distinct group with distinct requirements which are very different from the needs of the culturally deaf, who use sign language.

We're hoping for a great turnout, and that this will be the first of many captioned-theater experiences in Seattle.

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

After considerable prodding and a certain amount of nail-biting on our part, it appears that captioned theater will indeed make a Seattle debut when the Paramount Theatre offers an open-captioned performance of A Chorus Line on Sunday, Aug. 10, at 6:30 p.m.

The captions will be visible from the ground floor orchestra-right section. Here's a link to purchase tickets for that particular performance. (THIS IS NO LONGER OPERATIVE -- SEE SUBSEQUENT POST).

Since this is the debut of captioning, we can excuse some "opening night jitters." Nevertheless, this hasn't gone exactly smoothly. Paramount evidently didn't commit to the captioning until last week, and didn't post information on its website until today (July 16). It isn't clear whether Paramount has set aside a block of tickets in areas where the captions will be most visible, there is no special link on the website that lets us purchase those tickets, and there does not appear to be any price for the tickets except the normal (hefty) price for orchestra-section seats. So there is still a long ways to go before those who require captioning are treated on a par with folks who need an ASL-interpreted performance.

The best way to ensure that we have more captioned theater is to attend.  

One of the objectives of the Washington State Communication Access Project (Wash-CAP) is to make live theater performances accessible throughout Washington to those who are hard of hearing or deaf, and particularly for the vastly under-served population that doesn't use sign language. This is one small step, but it is in the right direction.

 

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

The Washington Communication Access Project (Wash-CAP) filed suit today in state court in Kitsap County, Washington, asking for an order requiring Washington State Ferries to display the text of messages given aboard the system's vessels and at its terminals.

Our complaint notes that WSF operates the nation's largest ferry system, carrying 26 million passengers annually, and that it routinely makes public-address announcements that convey a broad array of information to its patrons. Those announcements, though, are unavailable to deaf and Hard of Hearing passengers.

The local press picked up on the lawsuit. It was the lead story in the Kitsap Sun on Tuesday, July 8, (complete with snarky but anonymous reader comments) and was in the Bainbridge Island Review on Wednesay, July 9.

I had carried on correspondence with WSF for several months before filing the suit. While WSF officials initially appeared responsive, saying at least that they acknowledged that the present system is problematic, they were very vague about any remedies. When pressed, they said that their systems aren't designed to display information broadcast over the PA system, but that they would investigate ways to contact crew members and request help.

At best, then, WSF was offering the kind of dependency that the D.C. Circuit recently rejected in the landmark case involving paper money and blind users. (And did you catch the absolutely lovely Associated Press story about the attorney who brought that suit?) Even then, I was skeptical, because WSF explicitly states that its crew members will not assist mobility-impaired passengers -- the only "accommodation" WSF will make to such passengers is to allow an attendant to ride free.

Wash-CAP felt a need to move relatively quickly against WSF because the ferry system is currently undertaking an in-depth review of its operational and capital needs. Wash-CAP wants to make sure that both the system and the State Legislature take the needs of the hearing-loss community into account as they make plans for the future.   

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

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.

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

Seattle's huge Paramount Theatre will offer a captioned performance of A Chorus Line in August of this year. That's a step in the right direction, even though it may be small and somewhat half-hearted.

When we get the exact date, we'll post that information on this site, and prod Paramount to post it on its website as well. Nothing will do more to spread the availability of captioning than a good turnout from the hearing-loss community.

Paramount's offer came in response to correspondence I have been conducting over the last several months with Paramount and with other Seattle theaters. I've been trying to make then aware of the unique needs of those of us in the hearing-loss community who do not use sign language, and especially those of us non-signers whose hearing loss is such that Assistive Listening Devices don't let us fully understand dialog and song lyrics.

I've referred to this group as the Significantly Hard of Hearing or SHOH, and I define that group specifically as those who don't gain full enjoyment of a performace through ALDs, but who do not sign, and therefore derive no benefit from ASL-interpreted performances. I've said that the SHOH require captioning in order to enjoy a theatrical performance.

The news from Paramount is not all good. Paramount says that it will seek feedback on the captioned performance from "the deaf and SHOH community." Paramount still makes the basic mistake of looking at us as one unified community. While we may have similar interests and similar sensory challenges, the accommodations we require are very different.

As I have pointed out to Paramount, asking those groups what they want is a waste of time. I'm absolutely certain that when you ask the culturally Deaf what accommodations they need, the answer will be, "ASL-interpreted performances," and if you ask the SHOH, the answer will be "captions." Just as it makes little sense to ask the SHOH to comment on the quality of an ASL-interpreted performance, it also makes little sense to ask the Deaf about the quality or adequacy of captions.

Ever the optimist, I'm hopeful that Paramount's response comes from naivete rather than from a deliberate effort to pit to groups against each other. In any event, the offer of a trial captioned performance is a step in the right direction, even if it might be a small and half-hearted step.

Rather than continuing to advocate as an individual for access to public facilities, my future work in this area will be undertaken in cooperation with the Washington State Communication Access Project, or Wash-CAP. I invite you to learn more about Wash-CAP, and join our efforts to open Washington's public places to those of us with hearing loss.

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

The hearing-loss community got a big courtroom assist from the vision-loss community earlier this month.

In a case that made national headlines, the District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals declared that U.S. paper money discriminates against the visually impaired, because there is no way other than through sight to identify the denominations of the bills. Pointing out that virtually every other country makes currency where the denominations can be separately identified by touch, the court declared that the Treasury Department had failed to demonstrate why it couldn’t do likewise.

The government – and indeed, one blind-advocacy organization – argued that this was a “no-harm, no-foul” situation, because blind folks could reliably depend on the kindness of strangers to identify the denomination of bills, and the complaining parties hadn’t demonstrated any actual harm. The court rejected that argument, noting that a prime purpose of disability law is to promote the independence of people with physical or sensory challenges -- in other words, to eliminate the need to rely on others.

Although that case was brought under the federal Rehabilitation Act, it has broad and very helpful implications for Wash-CAP’s efforts to expand access for those of us with hearing loss. The court declared that once plaintiffs showed that many other nations produced bills distinguishable by feel, the burden then shifted to the U.S. Treasury to demonstrate why it couldn’t do likewise. That is exactly the argument Wash-CAP is making to the Paramount and 5th Avenue Theatres in Seattle in requesting captioned performances – theaters in other cities do it, so why can’t you?

I worry about whether this case will hold up on appeal. It is solidly reasoned, in my view, but currency redesign is such a high-profile issue that the U.S. Supreme Court may be inclined to review the case, and the Supremes – especially Justices Scalia and Thomas – have been overtly hostile to disability claims. But the DC Circuit is an enormously influential court, so if the decision isn’t upset – or, if it is upset only on a procedural technicality, such as the technicality that provoked a dissent – this will become essentially the disability-law case that we will all cite all the time.

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

PUBLIC FACILITIES: ADA requires that every "public facility" furnish aids and services that will enable us to fully enjoy the services provided. "Public facility" is a broad term that encompasses virtually every place we might patronize, including places like hospitals, doctors' and lawyer' offices, stores, theaters and so forth. While public facilities do not have to give primary consideration to our individual requests, they do have to accommodate us in the most integrated setting possible.

Again, the facility need not provide aids and services that would constitute an undue burden, and again, that is determined in reference to the enterprise as a whole. For example, a doctor cannot refuse to provide a sign-language interpeter for a deaf patient simply because the interpreter costs more than the amount charged to the patient -- the question is whether the doctor's entire practice is able to absorb that cost. Nor can the facility charge more to patrons who request aids and services.

There are some significant exceptions. Any entity operated by a religious organization is exempt from the public-facility requirement, even if the entity serves only a secular purpose. (Although they are not covered by the ADA, many churches have been among the leaders in providing aids and services). Bona fide private clubs are also exempt, but there are fairly stringent tests to determine which private organizations can claim this exemption. Organizations that require a membership fee but are open to all would seldom qualify, and if a private club rents its facilities to the public, at least some of its activities may be covered by ADA.

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

GOVERNMENT ENTITIES. We're all entitled to participate in the civic life of our city, state and nation, and we're entitled to enjoy the benefits provided by the government. So in most instances, any facility or service operated by a state or local government must offer aids and services sufficient to ensure that communication with us is as effective as communication with those whose hearing is undiminished. In determining what aids and services to offer, public entities must give "primary consideration" to our preferences.

The most significant national case dealing with the duties of public entities towards those with hearing loss comes from Kitsap County. A man asked that his divorce trial be captioned. Instead, he was offered listening devices, a small and acoustically friendly courtroom, and the opportunity to move around so that he could speech-read the testifying witnesses. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeal ruled those aids and services were insufficient. It reminded the county of its obligation to give "primary consideration" to the requests of the individual, and warned abainst furnishing aids and services based on "stereotypes," such as the belief that assistive listening devices are adequate for all individuals with a hearing loss, or that all of us benefit from sign-language interpretation.

In the wake of that decision, the Washington Supreme Court adopted General Rule 33, which applies to all non-federal courts in Washington. It provides that any participant in a court proceeding is entitled to the aids and services they request if they give two weeks' notice unless it would be impossible to provide the service an the date scheduled for the proceeding, and it would be impossible to continue the proceeding until the aids and services became available.

While GR 33 takes care of the access problem for parties, witnesses, jurors and attorneys, it leaves open the question of whether aids and services have to be provided for spectators. My own view is that ADA essentially requires equal treatment where possible, and that if a court proceeding is open to hearing spectators, then aids and services must be provided to make the proceeding equally open to those with hearing losses.

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

Television captioning has been a godsend for those of us with significant hearing losses. The captioning makes television instantly accessible, and means that for all its faults, television is something we can fully enjoy ourselves, and is an experience we can share with our spouses and families.

Once in a while, though, it would be nice to do something different, like a play. We go along, but when we can't hear what's going on, it's not all that great for us ... and it isn't so great for the people we're with, either.

It doesn't have to be like this. Spoken dialog or sung lyrics can be reduced to text, letting us "hear" along with the rest of the audience. What's said or sung can be captioned in real time or in advance, and the captions displayed to some or all of the audience. For theaters that can't afford those elaborate electronic devices, hard-of-hearing patrons could be provided with a script and a penlight at virtually no cost.

There is no reason why every theater can't make every performance accessible to those with hearing loss. Continue reading this post to find out how we're progressing on this issue.

Continue Reading...

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks (1)

Wash-CAP

The Washington State Communication Access Project

Enriching the World
For Those With Hearing Loss

We’ve lost some or all of our hearing. But that shouldn’t mean losing our social lives or our independence. We should be able to enjoy plays, lectures and movies, ride the ferry, catch a plane, attend a meeting, take a class or go to a restaurant with the same level of ease and enjoyment as those with full hearing.

With the cooperation of others, our loss of hearing need not mean a loss in the quality of our lives. All that is necessary is to reduce the spoken word to written form.

The good news is that the law requires that kind of cooperation, and the technology exists to make it possible. The bad news is that in reality, the cooperation that we need and that the law demands is the exception rather than the rule.

Wash-CAP intends to change that.

With your help, Wash-CAP can put us back into the world. Please join our effort.

www.wash-cap.com
www.hearinglosslaw.com

TO LEARN MORE ABOUT WASH-CAP, PLEASE READ THE REST OF THIS POST

Continue Reading...

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks