Ridor on "Perseverance or Persistence?"

I should have mentioned this earlier, but I've followed a lot of theatre chains on their odyssey of making themselves accessible to everyone. Some places go all out. Some places need a bit of encouraging and pounding to include a bit more accessibility. What Ridor did in his "Perseverance … or Persistence?" post last week got me thinking and looking back.

Sometimes too many nondisabled people think only of themselves when they build something and include things like captions or other related accessibilities as an afterthought. Building it into the current construction is cheaper than doing it after it's done. Observe curb cuts for wheelchairs and related. Sure, we passed the ADA for a reason, but this kind of thing should be common sense as we're leveling the playing field for everyone and not excluding anyone.

Of interest to Jamie Berke and I was a theatre being built not too far from us that opened about a year ago after about a year of construction. Every now and then, I would sometimes go out to the area just to see how far they had gotten. Currently, this theatre has 2-3 levels of parking below it with an elevator leading just outside the theatre entrance. There are some offices and a couple restaurants as part of the building, and the entire area around it has various retail shops, two grocery stores, a post office, a weekly seasonal farmers market, and is a short bus ride from a metro stop. We've both been there to watch captioned movies. Last time we were there, I observed a man with his wife who used a wheelchair, and they did pretty well getting around.

Another theatre further south of us in an outlet mall also has open captions and/or rear window and was completed about 2-3 years ago.

If theatres think it's too expensive to add on rear window or show open captioned movies, then they should think of how much money they're losing since many deaf only go to captioned/subtitled movies. It's also location, location, location.

Good job, Ridor! You've probably made at least an impression somewhere. Looks like he did in his WFD Conference post and the one before when he and the manager talked.