Final Regulatory Assessment and Final Regulatory Flexibility Analysis Final Rule - Nondiscrimination on the Basis of Disability by Public Accommodations - Movie Theaters; Movie Captioning and Audio Description

This section summarizes significant changes between the final rule and the 2014 NPRM and explains how these changes impact the Final RA.

The Department has decided to defer until a later date the decision whether to engage in rulemaking with respect to movie theater auditoriums that exhibit analog movies exclusively.  The Department’s research indicates that very few analog movie theaters remain, and that the number of such movie theaters has declined rapidly in recent years due, in large part, to the movie industry’s conversion to digital cinema.  The Department believes that it is prudent to delay further rulemaking with regard to analog movie theaters until it is clear whether, for example, there will be any movie theaters in the future that continue to show analog movies exclusively, whether analog movies will continue to be produced, and, if so, whether they will be produced or distributed with captioning and audio description.  As a result of this decision, the primary analysis of the Final RA does not assess the costs to provide captioning and audio description for analog auditoriums. 

The Department has lowered the minimum required scoping for captioning and audio description devices in order to ensure that the scoping requirements sufficiently provide access to individuals with hearing and vision disabilities who need and will use the devices without requiring movie theaters to purchase more equipment than is necessary.  The Department has adopted the minimum captioning device scoping suggested in a joint comment submitted by the deaf and hard of hearing community in conjunction with the movie exhibition industry.  The Final RA uses these scoping requirements to estimate the costs of the final rule, as presented in Section 3.3.3.  Similarly, the Department has adopted the minimum audio description device scoping suggested by the movie exhibition industry.  Section 3.3.4 shows the audio description device scoping requirements that the Department used in the Final RA’s cost estimation.

In the final rule, the Department has identified the specific types of communications that are subject to the notice requirement.  Movie theaters must provide notice of the availability of captioning and audio description on all communications and advertisements listing movie showings and times that are provided at or on any of the following: the box office and other ticketing locations, Web sites, mobile apps, newspapers, and the telephone.  This list is exhaustive.  Despite this change, the Department maintains its position that any costs associated with the notice requirement are de minimis because indicating the availability of captioning and audio description should not increase the cost of advertisements.  (See Section 2.4.4.2 for more detailed discussion regarding why these costs are likely de minimis, which includes a discussion of the existing practice among many movie theaters of using abbreviations to indicate the availability of closed movie captioning, e.g., “CC”, and audio description, e.g., “AD”).  Therefore, the Final RA’s cost estimation with regards to the notice requirement remains unchanged.

Because movie theaters may comply with the requirement to provide captioning at all screenings of a digital movie produced or distributed with such features through the provision of open movie captions, the Department has added a requirement that movie theater staff know how to turn on the open movie captions.  This requirement applies to the extent that a movie theater intends to comply with this rulemaking by providing open movie captioning at all showings or on-demand whenever requested by or for a movie patron with a hearing disability.  Since the Initial RA, the Department has changed its methodology for estimating the training costs associated with this rulemaking, and the Department’s training costs estimate in the Final RA includes the associated costs to train movie theater staff on how to turn on the open movie captions (Section 3.7).