October 13th 2005
RE: Full Captioning in Movie Theatres
On behalf of Society of Deaf and Hard of Hearing Nova Scotians I am writing to lend our support to the human rights complaint of Gary Malkowski, Nancy Baker and Scott Simser regarding the lack of access to captioned movies in movie theatres.
Society of Deaf and Hard of Hearing Nova Scotians was established in 1980 and provides a wide range of programs and services to the estimated 55,000 Deaf, deafened, hard of hearing and deaf blind people in the province of Nova Scotia. Our mandate includes working with the community to ensure full access to existing public and private services and programs.
The lack of captioning not only denies people with a hearing loss full access it also impacts on their hearing families and friends. It is obvious that a sizable percentage of the population is impacted both directly and indirectly by the lack of captioning. Given that current technology has made captioning easily feasible it is reasonable to ask of movie theatre owners and distributors that movies in theatres are made fully accessible.
Scott Simser, Nancy Baker and Gary Malkowski are to be commended for taking this action which will ensure equality of access for Deaf and hard of hearing people and their families and friends all across the country. Scott, Gary and Nancy are amongst those of us who do not just see things the way they are but also see things the way they could, and should, be.
We look forward to the day when full captioning and full access is a reality rather than an ideal, a day we hope to see soon.
Sincerely,
Frank O' Sullivan
Executive Director