Devices Gather Dust Because Government Ignores
Demos
Why
Assistive Listening
Headsets Are Rarely Used
by Steven John Fellman
NATO Washington Counsel
If you look in the office of a typical motion
picture theatre manager or in the closet behind the guest
services
desk, you will probably find boxes and boxes of unopened
assistive listening device headsets. In a large complex,
the guest services department may have a dozen headsets
with charged batteries that are ready to use. However,
there may be several dozen boxes of ALD headsets sitting
behind the desk that have never been used and never will
be used.
On an industry-wide basis, theatre owners
are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars for equipment
that serves
no purpose. Why must the industry buy this equipment? The
reason is that the Department of Justice doesn’t
understand the motion picture theatre industry.
| If you compare the relative age of persons who have
hearing impairments and the relative age of persons
who go to the movies, you can see that statistically,
the population age group with the highest incident
of hearing impairments is the population age group
that is least likely to attend movies. |
We recently reviewed an article published
in the Hearing Review1 that had some interesting data.
The article is
entitled “MarkeTrak VII: Hearing Loss Population
Tops 31 Million People.” The article has data indicating
that there are 31.4 million people with hearing impairments
in the United States. Of this number, 3.9 million are under
age 35. This means roughly 87.5 percent of the hearing
impaired population is over age 35.
Data developed by NATO and published in
the 2004/2005 Encyclopedia of Exhibition shows that 67
percent of movie admissions
are individuals 39 and under. This data demonstrates that
a great majority of hearing-impaired people fall within
an age group that historically does not regularly attend
movies.
When the Department of Justice originally
evaluated how many assistive listening device headsets
cinemas should
keep on hand, the department utilized data indicating that
there were approximately 28 million hearing impaired Americans.
Based on this data, the Department of Justice adopted a
requirement that a motion picture theatre auditorium should
have a number of assistive listening device headsets equal
to 4 percent of the number of seats in the auditorium.
The Department of Justice did not differentiate between
a public facility such as a motion picture theatre which
shows the same movie several times a day and where one
headset can be used multiple times, and another type of
facility such as legitimate theatre which may have only
one show a day and where one headset can only be used once
per day.
If you compare the relative age of persons
who have hearing impairments and the relative age of persons
who go to the
movies, you can see that statistically, the population
age group with the highest incident of hearing impairments
is the population age group that is least likely to attend
movies.
Let’s take our analysis one step further. According
to the article cited above, the average age of a first-time
owner of a hearing aid is 69.7 years. The revised Americans
With Disabilities Act Accessibility Guidelines (ADAAG)
requires that movie theatres install hearing-aid-compatible
headsets in their auditoria. Auditoria of 200 or fewer
seats must have two hearing-aid-compatible receivers. Auditoria
of over 200 seats must have one hearing-aid-compatible
receiver for every 100 seats or fraction thereof. Current
data indicates that only 50 percent of all hearing aids
have a “T-coil” that enables the user to access
a hearing aid compatible headset. Again, comparing the
average age of moviegoers to the average age of hearing
aid users explains why the great majority of hearing-aid-compatible
headsets or inductive loops will not be used.
When the U.S. Access Board, an independent
federal agency whose primary mission is accessibility for
people with
disabilities, held hearings on the proposed revised ADAAG,
NATO submitted data showing that assistive listening devices
are rarely used in motion picture theatres. In light of
this data, the Access Board reduced the total number of
assistive listening device headsets required but basically
ignored the weight of the evidence that showed that in
a typical multiplex, the number of required headsets could
be reduced by two-thirds without affecting the ability
of hearing impaired persons to have access to a headset.
Motion picture theatre operators want hearing-impaired
persons to have access to motion picture theatres. It makes
sense to provide headsets to persons who can use them.
It makes no sense to have thousands of boxes of headsets
sitting unused and unopened in motion picture theatres
throughout the country. 
