Audio description is increasingly available for first-run movies, and more and more movie theaters are being built or renovated with the necessary equipment to offer the description track to patrons. This page will point you to more information about the process, the movies, and the theaters. Last updated January 2017. ATTENTION STAR WARS FANS: All seven Star Wars movies have been released with audio description. You can purchase all of the first six Episodes of Starwars with description on Blu-ray discs. The Force Awakens is also available now on DVD and Blu-ray. 'Seeing Movies': Technology Makes Film Accessible To The Blind The president of the ACB, Kim Charlson, was interviewed in February 2015 for a segment on Boston's WGBH television, the local PBS outlet. emphasized how valuable audio description has been for her in the enjoyment and complete appreciation of movies. The Department of Justice proposal requiring movie theaters to install description and captioning
equipment was addressed, too. You can view the 4 minute segment below read the article in print, or click here for an audio version. Another ACB member, Carl Richardson, also enjoys going to movies thatHe was featured in an article in the Boston Globe entitled, Devices give blind filmgoers Oscar-worthy experience. New Hampshire theater added accessible films for people with sight or vision impairment, while a welcomes people with disabilities. Listen to a 2½-minute audio on Audio Description in Movies, or listen to the full 22-minute A few years ago, movie theaters began converting from film projectors to digital, each with a server that processes and distributes the movie data, including audio description tracks. Each month, more and more movie theaters install one of these systems, making the audio description available to people who need it. everything (movie, multiple sound tracks, and captioning) are all delivered
in something called the Digital Cinema Package (DCP), which any company can access through common standards, so the competition for equipment is increasing and the cost of installation is decreasing. server multiple screens in a movie house. While the DCP is currently a physical product (a hard-drive), eventually the data will be delivered to movie theaters via satellite. Sony Digital Cinema Overview (Photo Copyright Sony) In movie theaters today, the dominant suppliers for digital equipment A separate Doremi product, CaptiView, is used for closed captioning. Sony has its own system which uses special glasses and earpieces. Typically a theater chain uses one system or the other in all of itsHere's what the Sony system (model Sony STW-C140GI, used by Regal and others) looks like. are plugged in, it puts the captioning on the glasses; is plugged in, the user hears audio description. Formerly, WGBH Media Access and DTS Access
offered a DVS Theatrical Player for description and captioning. WGBH system offered closed captioning via a separate system called Rear Window® Captioning (RWC), while the DTS Access system offered open captioning on-screen via a special projector. These systems are being phased out and replaced by digital products not marketed by either company. However, WGBH Media Access, as the dominant provider of movie description tracks (over 1200 so far), uses the term the creation of the tracks, and they are very much in that business. There are some real "good guys" in the history of making audio description tracks available, for example, AMC and Regal. Cinemark, the third largest theater chain in the United States, engaged in a process called Structured Negotiations with its blind patrons and the California Council of the Blind in 2012, and now has audio description equipment in every first-run auditorium it operates in the
But other companies have often resisted offering description and captioning, even when the equipment was readily available to them (through the conversion to digital). part, this resistance is what triggered the Proposed Amendement to ADA Affecting Movie Theater Accessibility in July 2014. WGBH Media Access tells us that "All major studios now caption and describe all wide released features and nearly all independent studiosNot all of that description makes it tobut some studios like Sony, Disney, and Universal have been providing it with almost all of their releases since 2010, followed later by Fox, Lionsgate, and Warner Bros. It's tough to get the smaller, independent studios to fund description of either movies or DVDs. Currently a few major studios (and some smaller ones) don't provide DVD description either; Bay Entertainment / Weinstein Co, Alchemy (formerly Millennium), Miramax FIlms, and Pure Flix. So what happens when a described movie ends its run and is released on
DVD and Blu-ray discs? Historically, very few described DVDs were released, but that changed dramatically starting in late 2009. Read more about this and how to order DVDs onYou will also find a huge number of described movies on A good source for finding described videos is Just use the filter to select Descriptive Video. A number of site visitors have also recommendedYou can search the site by location or movie name, and by signing up for a free account, you can save and navigate to your favorite movie theaters. When you find a specific movie, navigate to the phrase, "Select a movie time to buy tickets." you down-arrow at this point, you are hoping to find the phrase, "Accessible devices available." should produce a pop-up box with either or both "Closed caption" and "DV" (which stands for Descriptive Video). You, of course, are hoping to find DV listed for the film in question! As a point of information, after each theater name there is a link