Theaters pledge to improve movie access for deaf and hearing-impaired

Lisa Yuan, who has profound hearing loss, is photographed wearing Sony's Entertainment Access Glasses on May 4, 2013. Having avoided all but foreign, subtitled movies for nearly 15 years, Yuan has enjoyed going to the movies more, utilizing the Sony glasses for their holographic technology, which projects caption text inside the glasses.
(Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times)

The nation’s theater owners have agreed to make their cinemas more accessible to deaf and hard-of-hearing patrons.






“These joint comments are the result of decades of efforts from A.G. Bell’s members and other deaf advocates to attain captioning access in movie theaters,” said John F. Stanton, chairman of the public affairs council of A.G. Bell. “Today is truly a landmark day in captioning access history.”

Anna Gilmore Hall, executive director of the Hearing Loss Assn. of America, called it a historic agreement that is a “‘Welcome Back’ banner for people who had given up going to the movies simply because they could no longer hear.”

The Assn. of Late Deafened Adults and the National Assn. of the Deaf also were part of the agreement with the theater owners’ trade group.





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