Overlawyered: Chronicling The High Cost Of Our Legal System

“Cinemark Agrees to Provide Audio Description at All First-Run Theaters”

Settling a prospect of litigation under the Americans with Disabilities Act:

Cinemark Holdings, Inc. (NYSE: CNK), one of the world’s largest motion picture exhibitors, today announced that it is providing an audio description option for people who are blind or have visual impairments in all of its first-run theatres. …

In audio description (also known as descriptive narration) a narrator provides vocal description of key visual aspects of a movie, such as descriptions of scenery, facial expressions, costumes, action settings, and scene changes, described audibly during natural pauses in dialogue or critical sound elements.

[Lainey Feingold via Sam Bagenstos, Disability Law]

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5 Comments

  • I’d like to hear the description of the love scenes in a movie like “Last Tango In Paris”. Or the scenes where the kids meet their fate in a movie like “Friday The 13th”.

    • By KDP

  • I guess this means theater prices will go up again.

    More reason to wait for the DVD and Netflix.

    • By OBQuiet

  • More reason to wait for the DVD and Netflix.

    Not so fast. Netflix will have to caption all of its movies by 2016.

  • “More reason to wait for the DVD and Netflix”
    That’s about the same time the movies come out on HBO, Cinemax, etc., where you can decide whether to turn on Closed Captioning or not. But, I get your point — another reason to have a Big-Screen , Cable and a Blu-Ray, and invite friends over to enjoy home popped pop-corn with real butter and salted to taste.

    • By wfjag

  • captioning is a text rendering of the dialogue for the deaf. Closed captioning is possibly a legal requirement. This is different and to my knowledge there is no legal requirement to produce audio described content. So if the company making the movie does an audio description and the company making the DVD/blue ray includes it on the disk, then NetFlicks already has it and it’s usable via second audio program (SAP) if they support SAP playback for their streaming service. Otherwise, it is present on the disk if it was provided by the maker of the disk. But present or not, I don’t know of any law requiring it to be there.

    • By Cecil