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Hard of Hearing and Going to the Movies: How do you deal with it?
Hearing Loss | Last Active: Mar 29, 2020 | Replies (33)Comment receiving replies
The best answer for helping us understand movies is a hearing loop (induction loop). The equipment is not prohibitively expensive but installation costs usually are. The next best thing is open captions (open captions are on the screen all the time). But there is so much opposition to that from a very vocal hearing population that movie makers, who make huge amounts of money, won't change. They know who pays them. Politicians tend to align their opinions with where their votes come from and that is hard to change. I don't see the influence of big money or the politicians changing anytime soon. So MY first two choices are off the list of likely possibilities.
I find so many closed captions are so poorly done they are almost useless. They are very poorly timed and displayed and contain too many errors. On my local TV news I have use either the audio only or caption only. Both together doesn't work very well for me, but confuse me even more. This issue IS fixable if they'd just do it.
ADA only requires that "reasonable accommodations" are made and the devices they now use are deemed "reasonable" even if they don't work very well for some of us. If movie theaters had hearing loops or open caption movies I'd probably go to movies. But without that I just don't go to movies. Because I have not gone to movies in the last 55 years I have no interest in Netflix or other presentation of movies available now. But I've never tried them. I'm a movie illiterate.
Replies to "The best answer for helping us understand movies is a hearing loop (induction loop). The equipment..."
@arrowshooter You may be pleasantly surprised if you try Netflix. I find their captioning is the best around.
JK
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Last movie I tried to see was "Dances With Wolves." Because Meniere's also affects balance and, thus, vision, I cannot tolerate any side-to-side movement like action on wide screens, watching a train go by, driving along a line of spaced trees when the sun and shadows make patterns, driving with the windshield wipers on high. I have to sit at an end to watch a basketball game rather than on either side. So, no movies or even really big screen TVs for me. I'm far, far too cheap to spend money to go to a movie when I know I'll need to keep my eyes closed through any action parts!
I prefer to watch series on TV. (Remember that I've been unsuccessful at getting closed captions.) Occurs to me that it's easier to decode what's being said when you can anticipate what the characters may do, unlike movies. With a movie, even an actor you've watched in a TV series is acting an entirely new role to you. With cable, you could spend hours watching old series. Cable is still fairly new to us, because we watched network TV with an antenna until we started living here full-time not quite six years ago.
My husband can quote lyrics from lots of 60s pop songs. Partly because at that time I was married to a symphony/opera musician and played in amateur groups myself, I never really listened to pop music. The radio in our home was always tuned to a classical station. It now occurs to me that, even then, before I had real hearing problems, I undoubtedly had some distortion, which made it difficult to understand lyrics. Until I heard my present husband quote lyrics, I had no idea what pop songs were about other than a general theme. The greatest single loss when Meniere's struck hard almost 40 years ago was that I couldn't play in ensembles or orchestras: the recruitment made me physically ill, plus I couldn't hear others well enough to contribute correctly myself. When I went bilateral almost a year ago, all music suddenly sounded like a kazoo chorus. Recently, the woman at Costco was finally able to adjust my aid so that music sounds less abnormal, which is a real godsend...except that our annual music festival has been cancelled.
I suspect that many of us didn't hear clearly long before we realized we really had a hearing problem.