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ADA regs start off with good intentions as you say, Steve, but often go much too far toward the unreasonable and I imagine without much input from the business that will be impacted. (BTW, where is NATO in all of this? Right at the forefront of the issue, I see). For example, a 5 year survey that we took of the attendance at our shows, made it clear that we never had requests for more than 5 Hearing Assist headsets at any one show and 93% of our shows had no requests for headsets at all. Yet the ordinance says we have to maintain 200 headsets for our house of 2500 seats in order to meet the ADA req. Do we want to accommodate patrons with that disability, absolutely; but being forced, to buy, maintain and store such an over inflated inventory when it is demonstrable that there will never be a need for that number, is absurd.
This open caption thing is just as unreasonable; to be required to had OC shows for a house full of movie-goers, none of whom have requested or need the ADA device is just as absurd Especially when we know that OC will negatively impact everyone and diminish their enjoyment of our product to a more or less degree. We will do everything we can to make the experience of our product as enjoyable for the disabled as we can -- it's ethical, it's the right thing to do and it is also good for business, but when bureaucrats are imposing the means to do that, the business owner should have a say in how to implement it, otherwise you wind up in this type of clearly over the top situation where a whole house full of movie-goers have to needlessly be subjected to subtitles when no one in the room needs them. It's spectacularly stupid; and the what sad is, it doesn't have to be.
I think the idea of being able to easily easily turn subtitles ON or OFF for a show could go a long way to lessen the impact. The goal is, accommodate hearing impaired individuals when the need arises while NOT imposing captions on an audience unnecessarily. That will have it's own problems -- it will be a given that you will always need to inform the general public that any particular show will be open captioned; if we make that contingent upon HI patrons making the request, 15min? 30 min? before showtime, then there is no way to let patrons know that any particular show will be OC, so a group of patrons start out 20 minutes to come to the theatre thinking they are going to see a movie without OC and they get there and , whoops, it's OC. That's not good for business. A solution might be, following the ADA OC schedule, so the GP knows those shows COULD be OC, and then only turn captions on if requested by HI patrons. So most of the time, even though a screening may be in the OC scheduled time slot, more than likely it will not be.
And I still say again, big mistake putting captions imposed on the image; partially letterbox the image and then run captions in the black bar. I think that will go quite a way to making them less intrusive and not cause as much ire in patrons who are really annoyed by subtitles when the theatre will need to run them. I know the younger people in my family are totally turned off by, and just refuse to watch a subtitled movie, which mainly is because of the needing to, you know... READ, but occasionally I have turned on captions for TV shows like CROWN because I can miss dialogue because of the accent. I have to fight to keep them on, so it's not only the "I hate to have to read subtitles," but also "I hate the distraction of constantly changing text added to the image."
Using a combination of such things things when approaching the issue is a way to accommodate the HI patron, but not negatively impact the entertainment value for the general public or the exhibitor's business.
This open caption thing is just as unreasonable; to be required to had OC shows for a house full of movie-goers, none of whom have requested or need the ADA device is just as absurd Especially when we know that OC will negatively impact everyone and diminish their enjoyment of our product to a more or less degree. We will do everything we can to make the experience of our product as enjoyable for the disabled as we can -- it's ethical, it's the right thing to do and it is also good for business, but when bureaucrats are imposing the means to do that, the business owner should have a say in how to implement it, otherwise you wind up in this type of clearly over the top situation where a whole house full of movie-goers have to needlessly be subjected to subtitles when no one in the room needs them. It's spectacularly stupid; and the what sad is, it doesn't have to be.
I think the idea of being able to easily easily turn subtitles ON or OFF for a show could go a long way to lessen the impact. The goal is, accommodate hearing impaired individuals when the need arises while NOT imposing captions on an audience unnecessarily. That will have it's own problems -- it will be a given that you will always need to inform the general public that any particular show will be open captioned; if we make that contingent upon HI patrons making the request, 15min? 30 min? before showtime, then there is no way to let patrons know that any particular show will be OC, so a group of patrons start out 20 minutes to come to the theatre thinking they are going to see a movie without OC and they get there and , whoops, it's OC. That's not good for business. A solution might be, following the ADA OC schedule, so the GP knows those shows COULD be OC, and then only turn captions on if requested by HI patrons. So most of the time, even though a screening may be in the OC scheduled time slot, more than likely it will not be.
And I still say again, big mistake putting captions imposed on the image; partially letterbox the image and then run captions in the black bar. I think that will go quite a way to making them less intrusive and not cause as much ire in patrons who are really annoyed by subtitles when the theatre will need to run them. I know the younger people in my family are totally turned off by, and just refuse to watch a subtitled movie, which mainly is because of the needing to, you know... READ, but occasionally I have turned on captions for TV shows like CROWN because I can miss dialogue because of the accent. I have to fight to keep them on, so it's not only the "I hate to have to read subtitles," but also "I hate the distraction of constantly changing text added to the image."
Using a combination of such things things when approaching the issue is a way to accommodate the HI patron, but not negatively impact the entertainment value for the general public or the exhibitor's business.
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