ADA Law: Final Ruling On Movie Captioning & Narrative

On November 21st, Attorney General, Loretta Lynch signed into law the Final ruling requiring ALL movie theaters in the U.S. to have and maintain equipment necessary to provide BOTH closed captioning and audio description (narrative) for all digitally presented movies.

The new law becomes effective once the Final Ruling is placed in the Federal Register, which will occur by the end of December.  Once the law is registered movie theaters will have a maximum of 18 months to comply with the law.

There are no exceptions to the law except for drive-in theaters and those theaters that run 35mm film exclusively. All cinemas screening any digital film must comply and have available both closed captioning equipment for the hearing impaired or deaf and audio narrative headsets for visually impaired or blind movie patrons.

The cost of systems to comply with the law are priced from $1100-1400 with the narrative eyewear from $575-625 and headset audio receivers from $75-90.  The number of eyewear and headset receivers is determined by the number of screens at any one cinema - this number is stipulated in the law.

To review the law, go to the ADA website (ADA.com) and search '2016 final rules for movie theaters'.