“It isn’t perfect, but it is lot better. The schedules online are better, employees are

better trained and seem to understand that I can’t hear their explanations. We can go as a group now and there will be plenty of working glasses or headphones. That’s great! I miss open captions, but I love being able to see any movie, any time, especially the ones in 3D.”

No Technology Before Its Time

The pre-digital workflow of getting a captioned and narrated movie to the cinema was complicated. It was separated from the delivery of hundreds or thousands of ‘standard’ prints to the theaters. The ability to place the narration and caption scripts into a separately shipped disc from a 3^rd party was easier than shipping extra sets of film canisters, but was still a source of extra work, cost, and often, delay. 

When digital cinema arrived, these problems were expected to dramatically diminish, along with the frustrations of only 1% inclusive screenings – at a minority of theater facilities. The expectation was more varied, capable and less expensive equipment in a competitive and standardized digital market. 

Unfortunately, the digital transition took longer than anyone expected, meaning that studios, distributors and exhibitors were required to support dual workflows. It also meant that exhibitors had to continue buying equipment that would soon be obsolete, and people who needed access equipment were forced to travel long distances – and tolerate disappointment when films or disks didn’t arrive or batteries were dead in the seldom used equipment that they needed.

In the June 17, 2008 Federal Register, the US Department of Justice (DOJ) discussed the issue of open and closed caption technology in a chapter of “Nondiscrimination on the Basis of Disability by Public Accommodations and in Commercial Facilities” titled: Captioning at movie theaters. 

Nuanced reading showed a belief that capabilities and equipment still in development were already in existence, and that changes could be made immediately if requirements were enacted. The DoJ issued an invitation for public comment, to answer many variations of two basic questions about captions and descriptive narration. They were:

Should the Department require that, one year after the effective date of this regulation, public accommodations exhibit all new movies in captioned format at every showing?

and

Should the Department require that, one year after the effective date of this revised regulation, a public accommodation will exhibit all new movies with narrative description?

At the public hearings in 2010 and January of 2011, advocates for exhibition asked for continued patience, while advocates of accessibility pointed to years of patience and how the many frustrations of the current system keeps them outside of the cinema experience. 

But in 2008, when the DOJ document was released, digital cinema presentation equipment was still continuing to evolve. Projectors and secure media players were based on an evolving but interim “InterOp” specification, instead of the long-expected SMPTE Standards and Recommended Practices. Ad hoc changes to InterOp continued even as the first of 46 SMPTE documents were finalized, the last being submitted to the ISO in 2011. 

Subsequently, with no interchange standard there was no working d-cinema captioning or assisted listening equipment in 2008. The film-based open caption/assisted listening equipment couldn’t interface with digital equipment. Production of d-cinema-based narration tracks was rare, burned-in open captions for digital presentations was more rare than common, and d-cinema equipment couldn’t automatically produce center channel-centric dialog tracks, which the old analog processors could. Each success of d-cinema into a theater that was previously showing accessible films was a loss of several accessible movies per week until the industry found a solution.