Hearing impaired and deaf outdoor movie viewers

We regularly are asked to display subtitles at our outdoor movie events and endeavor to provide subtitles when requested by deaf and hearing impaired patrons. 

I recently received an email from a colleague with a good question, "Most of the time when we get a request for captioning, we simply select the English subtitles. This week at a show the dvd didn't offer English subtitles and we could not figure out how to access any closed captions. It seems the problem is in the authoring of the dvd. Broadcast signals must have closed captions but apparently the same rules do not apply to dvd authoring or dvd player manufacturers. Anyone else have any experience with this issue?".

I answered that he was correct. Most newer DVD's are authored to offer accessibility to our deaf brothers and sisters using subtitles. Older titles often offer subtitles only in other languages. The DVD description online has this info so you can be prepared in advance.

IMDB used to offer more complete DVD/BluRay details but no longer does. Amazon does however off this info. So for outdoor movie operators, it is fairly easy to do the research.