In an historic first, Hearing Loss Association of America (HLAA) along with the National Association of the Deaf (NAD), the Association of Late Deafened Adults (ALDA), the Alexander Graham Bell Association for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing (AG Bell) sat down with representatives from the National Association of Theater Owners (NATO) to hammer out an agreement on movie captioning. HLAA is pleased to announce that our meetings resulted in two documents which have been filed with the US Department of Justice (Justice) in its rulemaking on movie access: the Joint Recommendations to the US Department of Justice and the Joint Voluntary Commitments on Closed Captioning and Video Description.
Panel at the table, from left: John Fithian (NATO, president & CEO); John Stanton (AG Bell, volunteer); I. King Jordan, Ph.D. (Gallaudet University, president emeritus, and ALDA); Anna Gilmore Hall (Hearing Loss Association of America, executive director); Andrew Phillips (NAD, policy counsel); Randy Smith (Regal Entertainment Group, senior vice president, chief administrative officer & counsel)
After several weeks of discussions, the five organizations agreed on a set of recommendations to the DOJ to improve access to movies for deaf and hard of hearing patrons.
- Closed captioning (CC) and audio description (AD) technologies are to be installed in all digital movie theater auditoriums nationwide.
- The joint plan establishes certain minimum closed captioning device requirements with a monitoring requirement. This flexible, market-responsive device scoping method will ensure access for all deaf and hard of hearing patrons and respond to actual consumer demand.
- The compliance period has been restructured to reflect reasonable timelines in delivery and installation of CC and AD systems.
