WA movie theaters now required to provide more open captioning

[Ryan Gallagher]

From the Seattle Times newspaper:

Source: https://www.seattletimes.com/enterta...s-per-new-law/

Cool. That clarifies my question. I missed somewhere above that the film was excempt unless it crossed the 5 scheduled screenings threshold. I was conflating the 5 or more (4 or less) location fork in the rules to cover everything. Thanks.

[Gordon McLeod]

Not that I've ever heard about.

Actually there are several laws in Canada requireing hearing assist and closed captioning. It is in the federal building code

[Jim Cassedy]

We play several retro titles every week. Some are on 35 or 70mm film, but
for the sake of practicality, most are on DCP. While some well known older
titles have been rendered with closed captions & descriptive audio tracks,
most do not. A while back, I had to go to the box office to help them deal
with a customer who was complaining about the film they came to see not
having any caption capability . Part of their argument was that they owned
DVD or Blu-Ray of the same title, which had a captioned version on the disk.
They insisted that "all I had to do was push a button" on the projector to
turn the captions on or off, and implied I was too incompetent or lazy to do
that. I tried explain the difference between home video and DCP, but my
words were falling on deaf ears. (No put intended, and didn't mean that
they were literally deaf, hey just didn't want to hear the explanation.)
This has happened once or twice before, but his customer was the most
upset about it.
Also, you'd be surprised (or maybe not) how many film-makers, who
should know better, don't understand the difference between "captions"
and "subtitles" I went through this with a documentary film-maker recently.
We got his content through an Aspera download link, and I had done a
quick QC check on screen the day before his show. I noticed that it had
captions on screen, and in a phone conversation the day before the
event, I mentioned that the download he pointed me to had 'open
caps' on screen, and is that what he wanted. He insisted there should
be no captions, and that I could 'just turn them off'. He then had the
guy who made their DCP for them, and he pretty much told me the
same thing, and that "I could just turn off the captions" in the projector.
Well, at some point I convinced the film maker that I was right about
the captions, but he insisted that was the only version they had.At that
point I was arguing a losing point. I told him "I'd fix it" for his show the
next day. What I wound up doing was to take his DCP and re-render
it in DCP-O-Matic™️, leaving out all the subtitle text files. The next
day, before his event I let him see his original version and then the
caption-less version I had re-rendered. We went with my version,
although I'm still not 100% sure he understood the problem.
Several days later, he sent me an urgent text message and then
actually called me to say he was on the East Coast doing another
screening, and "they were having the same problem" there. He
asked if I still had the caption-less version I made. I then arranged
to give him a link where the theater there could download the
version I made without captions, and they used my version for
their show that night.

[Frank Cox]

laws in Canada requireing hearing assist and closed captioning

It's my understanding that there are laws requiring captioning for broadcast media, but I've never heard of a similar requirement for movie theatres.

If there's a requirement for that, it hasn't ever come to my attention.

[Marcel Birgelen]

Those laws and regulations can happen at many different levels of government...

Around here, there are no laws regarding subtitling movies for people with hearing impairments, unless it's a movie that's locally subsidized...