by Brenda Jo Brueggemann
Ohio State University
Currents in Electronic Literacy Spring 2001 (4), <http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/currents/spr01/brueg.html>
Endnotes
2. There is currently a lot of bickering and bantering—even a rather major lawsuit on file—about access (or rather, the lack thereof) for deaf/hard-of-hearing people to most major movie theaters and first-run movies. Information on this “crisis” can be found at: http://www.captions.org/ . From there, click on the link to “movies.” As the site emphasizes, the situation over captioning in movie theaters is quite miserable, even after 10 years with the ADA in place:- While
the Americans with Disabilities Act guarantees Hard of Hearing people access
via assistive listening systems, there is no captioning guarantee in place
for DEAF people (or hard of hearing people who can not understand movies
adequately with assistive listening devices alone) when it comes to movie
theaters. The captioning industry and studios are bickering over what caption
display technique to use. While they bicker, time marches on and the majority
of deaf and hard of hearing people are STILL unable to go to their neighborhood
movie theater and buy a ticket. Right now, there appears to be competition
between two technologies: open captioning, and Rear Window captioning .
Tripod Captioned Films has been screening open captioned films for years.