By Cadie Carroll
Arizona Attorney General Tom Horne has sued the Arizona Cardinals, demanding the team provide captions on all monitors at the University of Phoenix Stadium.
The suit was filed on behalf of Michael Ubowski, a profoundly deaf man who has been trying for years to convince the Cardinals to use open captioning.
In its complaint, the state claims that football “is a vital part of the social lives of Arizonans, fostering community bonds that strengthen their ties to the state and creating shared experiences that strengthen their ties to each other.”
The Cardinals used open captioning from 1988 to 2006 when they played in Arizona State’s Sun Devil Stadium in Tempe, something that Ubowski and other deaf fans appreciated.
“Ubowski made numerous attempts between October 2005 and 2007 to consult with Arizona Cardinals’ management and encourage them to voluntarily adopt effective auxiliary aids and services to provide deaf and hard of hearing patrons an experience like that enjoyed by other Arizona Cardinals fans,” Horne states in the suit.
In August 2007, Ubowski received an email from the Cardinals’ director of stadium operations stating the team would not provide captioning on the Jumbotron as he had requested, but rather would “install three small, caption-enabled monitors in a disabled seating section with six reserved seats,” according to the complaint.
In 2010, the Cardinals stopped using monitors and began using wireless PDAs to transmit captions.
According to Horne, Ubowski and his father tried using the PDAs and found not only that they were “difficult to locate, obtain, and use,” but that there were “delays in the transmission of the captions and frequent device malfunctions.”
The complaint also highlighted another major problem the deaf and hard of hearing community has with PDAs: handheld devices make it “impossible to communicate in sign language, cheer, clap, eat, and drink,” and also take your attention away from the field and scoreboard.
More than five years after Ubowski first came to the Cardinals, the team began using open captioning but only on stadium ribbons and under video boards.
Horne says that captioning is still not available in main areas or on the main Jumbotron, which is why he is taking action.
The University of Phoenix Stadium is owned and operated by the Arizona Sports and Tourism Authority. Stadium operations are managed by Global Spectrum.
