"Start Making It Happen"

A conversation with Erik Nordlof about the DC open-captioned movie bill

Hey readers —

One goal I have for this Substack newsletter in 2025 is to spotlight more discussions about how to work toward a more open and accessible world. (This sure feels relevant during this week in American life and politics.)

I’ve always believed that writing can be a form of conversation, and with today’s newsletter I’m kicking off an occasional interview series with various people about their insights and tangible work on accessibility, storytelling, advocacy, the arts, and more.

I’m especially excited to send out today’s edition, which features my good friend Erik Nordlof, one of the most invested advocates I know. Erik and I first met almost ten years ago now (!), when another mutual deaf friend told us that we should connect, since we both cared about captioning advocacy and many other issues. We grabbed coffee on one of my visits to Washington, DC and have kept in touch ever since.

Erik has lived in DC since 2009, and he’s the founder of DC Deaf Moviegoers and Allies, a group that advocates for more widespread open captioning for movies in theaters across the DC area. He’s also one of the masterminds behind the wonderful Deaf City Events account, which shares local events from deaf socials and outings to ASL museum tours and interpreted talks. I’m jealous of everything on this account, including the monthly Deaf Professional Happy Hour Erik organizes — one day I’m determined to make it out for one of those!

And the focus of today’s newsletter: Erik’s captioning advocacy led to a recent DC law that requires movie theaters to offer more open captioned screenings for all their films, including during peak hours and on the weekends. After years of working through the local legislative process, in collaboration with fellow deaf advocates Reema Bogin and Brianne Burger, this bill was finally passed in July 2024 and went into effect in October. You can read more about it here.

In recognition of their advocacy, Erik, Reema, and Brianne were recipients of the (rather delightfully named) Knights of the Flying Fingers Award at the National Association of the Deaf’s biennial conference last summer. This award recognizes individual NAD members who have demonstrated dedicated volunteer service in support of the deaf and hard of hearing community.

I asked this newly minted knight if he’d chat with me about open captioning, advocacy, and some of the ins-and-outs of pursuing accessibility-related legislation, aka actually making change happen. Our conversation follows below.

You've been involved with movie theater and open captioning advocacy for a while now. How did you first start with this work, and what were the origins of DC Deaf Moviegoers and Allies?

As a lifelong movie buff, I started advocating for open captioning at movie theaters because the closed captioning devices were atrocious. I was excited at first about the devices, but then when I used them, I kept experiencing lines of dialogue being dropped. I kept missing out, mentally trying to fill the gap of what could have been said, and being taken out of the moviegoing experience. The most infuriating experience I had was trying to see the 2015 movie "Sicario" in theaters, where it felt like every other line dropped, which was exacerbated in an expositional scene. About 10 minutes in, I just gave up and left and got a refund.

That same day, I complained on Facebook and asked friends about open captions. I got some insights that OC was possible and that it was just a matter of movie theaters turning that on. I contacted movie theaters' managers to ask about having OC screenings. I decided to set up an OC screening for "The Martian" and set up the Facebook group DC Deaf Moviegoers and sent out a Doodle.com poll to find out what dates and times people preferred for that movie. We had two OC screenings set up for that movie, and the first one was especially successful, with the auditorium of 120 seats being nearly all deaf or hard of hearing.

From then on, with the help of a hearing-ally friend, I did monthly surveying to find out what deaf moviegoers wanted to see, which did tend to skew more toward blockbuster movies. I corresponded with movie theaters' managers and requested OC screenings and created Facebook events to invite people. It was essentially crowdsourcing, and unfortunately OC screenings had to be manually requested. Eventually, I started an email address for DC Deaf Moviegoers and started a mailing list to update followers about what OC screenings were coming up. The emails started including movie theaters in Northern Virginia and Maryland that started doing OC screenings with some prodding.

Over the years, the Facebook group and the mailing list grew into hundreds, then thousands of people. Every week, I sent out an email listing the movie theaters and the titles for which they had OC screenings. It was around 2017 when I started with a couple of friends to push in earnest for an open captioned movie bill.

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What were those initial conversations about an open captioned movie bill like? What did you want to see happen, and how did you make the local legislative contacts you needed?

In mid-2017, I worked with a friend to contact deaf organizations like HLAA-DC, TDI, DCA-BDA, etc. to get endorsement for an open captioned movie bill. We also researched open captioned movie bills elsewhere, like the successful one in Hawaii and failed ones like in Nebraska. We started developing a fact sheet to outline the deaf and hard of hearing population in the Washington, DC area, to highlight frustrations with closed-captioning devices, to indicate curb-cut effects, and to list endorsements (see appendix).

Another friend joined us in early 2018. I think in addition to reaching out to DC Councilmembers' offices, we leveraged the help of deaf peers who had more of a connection to DC Council. In May, we met DC Councilmember Charles Allen whose ward included the deaf-populated NoMa neighborhood and borders Gallaudet), who was completely supportive of such legislation, even saying that his children watch TV with captions at home. (Gallaudet was in Kenyan McDuffie's ward, and we weren't able to get a meeting with him until June.) Allen got legislation introduced in September with three other DC Councilmembers co-sponsoring (link) with a hearing set for December 11, 2018, and we met with other DC Councilmembers (Mendelson, Cheh, and Todd) before then, bringing our fact sheets.

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It really can take a while to get a bill through the legislative process. What were some of the provisions that wound up in the final bill, and what was the rest of the process like?

The variations of the bill all required a certain number of open captioned screenings and for at least some of them to be during peak hours. We pushed for a percent-based approach in the middle of the process, but movie theaters' feedback to the legislative director working on the bill is that it would be too difficult to apply, so we stuck with actual numbers. The variations always had a public awareness campaign required, though I am not really sure if that has come to happen beyond the efforts of the DC Deaf Moviegoers group.

What was included in the final bill was a matter of enforcement, something completely lacking for closed captioning devices (allowing movie theaters to feign effort to fix them). A couple of times so far, I have messaged the DC Office of Human Rights highlighting a movie theater not showing a title with open captions during peak hours, and I CC'd the movie theater. The result is a very fast fix!

At the beginning, our process was to try to meet with as many uncommitted DC Councilmembers as possible and to present them with fact sheets. We conversed with two legislative directors, one who was under CM Allen and laid out the main language of the legislation, and later with a different CM's legislative director who put together the committee report (seen here and very detailed). Early on, we had to argue against the National Association of Theatre Owners' sky-is-falling claims about the implementation of OC. Unfortunately, they convinced DC Council to let them have a pilot program where they would have movie theaters show OC at various times and get Ernst & Young to do a study on that. Then the pandemic happened. While the pilot program meant more OC times than ever before, I thought it was a stalling tactic to avoid legislation. It made me wonder what businesses tried to do to prevent the passage of ADA back then. After the pandemic, the study never happened, and we kept pushing. NATO never really reappeared in the open to push back on the final legislation, perhaps conceding the matter (for DC, anyway).

As mentioned above, I learned how the whole process can go, and also how slow it can feel. It was also tricky to know how much to keep following up with DC Council, like whether to trust their handling of the process or to nudge them to keep it at the forefront. Also, while I figured it was safe to assume, it was fantastic to get the explicit support of so many local and national deaf and hard of hearing organizations when we first started pushing for a law, with their submitting testimonies in favor. The frustration over the status quo of closed-captioning devices was definitely there, and it boiled over. While we could always use more OC times (and perhaps we will revisit the legislation for more later), it feels like a well-deserved win for the DC deaf and hard of hearing community to have equal access at the movies. Hopefully the success here, in Hawaii, New York City, and Maryland, will drive others for similar success on state or city levels. Perhaps someday success on a federal level.

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I feel like every deaf person has their own stories of frustration with the movie-theater captioning devices. What’s the biggest problem with going to the movies with those devices?

Closed-captioning devices were designed to put the burden on deaf moviegoers to get access. What if there was opposite technology — universal open captions in place, and hearing moviegoers were given the option of using devices to filter out captions? How would they react to that setup? With acquiescence or outrage?

Hearing aesthetic preference held back true deaf accessibility, and it did not help that multiple CC devices meant multiple points of failure. I remember using rear-window captioning, which I feel was better than closed captioning devices, where you had one screen behind you with words in reverse, and all one needed was an opaque panel to catch the reflection that showed the words properly. Each and every CC device, and their firmware and battery, has to be taken care of, and unfortunately nothing in the law had teeth to hold movie theaters accountable.

If everyone grew up with captions on the screen, it simply would not be a big deal. Unfortunately we have lived in a country where many have not, though the younger generation appears to embrace captions more wholeheartedly. So we have to overcome the weight of history in non-use of captions so it is simply part of everyday life.

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Do you have advice for others who want to get involved with this kind of advocacy, whether for captioning or something else?

My first bit of advice is to not assume that someone is working on something. Go and find out for sure, and if it's not happening, start making it happen. It also greatly helps to find representatives who "get it" or at least want to get it and to advocate for your community. Organization and persistence are also key, to track and gather support from deaf individuals and organizations and additional representatives, and to keep following up to get a response. We're all inundated with emails and posts, and if someone has not responded in three days, they're not likely to get back to you. So it's important to have the drive to follow up over a long time period. It can feel glacial at times, but without persistence, an initiative will fall by the wayside.

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Cheers to everyone involved with this effort, and thanks for reading! I’m including Erik’s appendix below, which includes the first set of endorsements received for the DC captioning bill. More endorsements followed at later stages, which certainly emphasizes the collaboration these laws require.

• Communication Services for the Deaf (CSD)

• Association of Late Deafened Adults

• Deaf Entertainment Access Foundation

• Greater Washington Asian Deaf Association

• State Representative James Tokioka (HI)

• Hearing Loss Association of America - DC Chapter

• DC Association of the Deaf

• DAWN (crisis intervention services for the Deaf, Hard of Hearing and Deaf-Blind communities)

• Duartek, Inc.

• Northern Virginia Cued Speech Association

• Deaf Access Solutions

• Northern Virginia Resource Center (NVRC)

• InnoCaption

• Greater Washington Asian Deaf Association (GWADA)