Good evening,

The answer, of course, is really, really REALLY big speakers... 

but seriously, there are a number of technologies that you can use for this. 
One of the methods is an inductive loop system whereby anybody with a 'T' 
setting on their hearing aid can just switch over to that and hear the audio 
through their hearing aid(s). The implementations vary from a single loop 
to "phased array" systems where you can really control the boundary of the 
inductive loop, and you could even have separate areas for two different 
languages with no more than a couple of feet between them. These same 
systems also have devices visitors hang around their necks with a headphone 
they can use - normally given out or rented. We did a rather large system 
covering an entire auditorium and it's really nice - it works exceedingly well 
especially for people with hearing aids with T switches.

Alternatives are an infra-red system which needs headphones for each person 
that wants to hear the audio, an LED sign below the screen that provides 
captioning off-screen, and an LED sign mirrored and behind the audience 
whereby some seats have a piece of acrylic in front of them that 
superimposes the sign behind a bit like a peppers ghost (can work very well 
and be unobtrusive for those who don't use it) - I've even seen one place 
where visitors were given a piece of acrylic so that they could overlay the 
captioning. 

You could go exotic (and expensive) and have some seats with built-in 
speakers aimed mostly up - but you should use linear array speakers so that 
you don't mess up the audio experience for others in the audience. 

For a quick commercial break (sorry - I just have to as it really is a very nice 
piece of equipment): our high definition video server allows for captioning to 
be present on screen (or for it to be output to an LED sign) where you can 
turn the captioning on or off during the program (and select different 
languages on the fly. Our server doesn't need anything special to edit or 
display subtitles (it just uses a text file that contains time and subtitle 
information including the words in plain text), and you can set the size, 
location and color to more or less whatever you want. 

Best regards,

Maris J. Ensing
Mad Systems Inc
www.madsystems.com

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