Dawn, besides being your Florida Travel Guide, is also my sister and she is well aware of my profound hearing loss that precludes me from understanding amplified speech. So, she knew I was a good candidate to use Disney's captioning device.
She gave me this link that gave the details of the devices available from Disney for the hearing impaired. Since the price was right — it is free (you just have to let them put a $100 deposit on your credit card and then they refund your money when you return it) — and since I owed my sister a favor or two, I readily agreed.
The devices are available at Guest Services — I picked up mine at the office to the left behind Spaceship Earth, after we entered Epcot. The Handheld Cpationing device is the size and shape of PDA, but due to a big battery, it is thicker and much heavier than my old Palm Pilot. They furnish a nice, thick lanyard so that you can wear it around your neck like an old-fashioned 35 mm camera. It weighs about the same (my guess is a little over a pound), so after 10 hours of wearing it in the park, the neck was a little stiff.
Disney provides a flyer that gives you a picture of the device and the function of the buttons, as well as, a list of the Disney World attractions that can be used with the device. (Epcot has seven attractions listed; the Magic Kingdom's list is twice as long, with 14 attractions. Animal Kingdom and Disney's Hollywood Studios list is short also, with five or six apiece.) If you explore the buttons, you'll find there is a menu and each of the park's attractions lists are included on the device itself. Thus, you can lose the flyer and still know where you can use it.
Captions automatically turn on when ever you are involved with one of the attractions where captioning is available. The display is quite bright, so you can read the menu items in the sunlight. In the darkened rides where captioning is available, you can use it for a flashlight. In fact, it is so bright, that it is a bit distracting to others on the rides with you.
I found though, that the syncing with the video being shown was erratic. The first attraction that we went into after I got the Handheld, was Universe of Energy. As with many Disney attractions, you have to listen/watch a video before you embark on the ride. The device did not turn on when the introduction video started and I tried pushing buttons to see if I could activate it — finally, as we were walking to climb into the big, wide transporters, it came on. (Which was after the video we watched had ended.) Captioning during the ride itself, however, was closely synchronized with the video we were seeing and I could read and understand the story line. I would not have been able to do that without the device.
The handheld captioning device also incorporates a remote infrared function (like your TV remote at home) that can turn on closed captioning on TVs that are used to introduce the story line for attractions. The brochure says that the TVs are tagged with CC. At Epcot, I did not encounter any, so I didn't get to test that function. (We mainly saw the attractions that did not have a long wait time and the TVs typically are in those areas.)
The device helped, but was not a panacea. Since it is separate and tethered to the lanyard, you look down at it at chest level. (At least that worked well with my bifocals.) You really have only two choices: a) read the captions, or b) watch the video and don't understand what is being said. Unlike closed captions on TV, where you can still see the action while you read.
One area that Disney should explore to expand the usefulness of the device is to caption the hosts when they are introducing films, etc. — particularly in the world showcase. While the hosts do ad lib some, their spiels are scripted and often include helpful or safety instructions that otherwise aren't understood by the hearing impaired.
If you are hearing impaired, you may want to try the handheld captioning device on your next trip to Disney. After all, the price is right — it is free. Whether the pain in the neck from wearing it on a lanyard around your neck all day is worth it, will be a personal decision that you can only make by trying it.
