State Attorney General-initiated lawsuits against exhibitors over ADA (American’s with Disabilities Act) compliance are now active in three states. As the potential grows to begin a large-scale rollout of digital cinema to major exhibitors, the ability of digital cinema to meet ADA compliance comes into question.
To date, only the WGBH Rear Window system is available on the closed captions front, and with digital cinema, it only works with Doremi and GDC servers. At ShoWest, USL demonstrated two infrared-driven closed caption receivers for audience use. One of these receivers is mounted in the cup holder, with an electronic display only visible to the audience member. The other is a pair of glasses to be worn by the audience member, through which the captions are displayed. A similar cup-holder based display previously touted to exhibitors by Personal Captioning Systems (PCS) was nowhere to be seen. Several reports say that Rob Haller, owner of the company, has not been returning calls. But others were on the ball. Not on the trade show floor, but at the show, was Georgia Tech’s Leanne West, who developed a closed caption system as part of Georgia Tech’s incubator program earlier this decade. The Georgia Tech effort, however, has been tied up for the past 1