It was obviously operated by a switch as it did not come on till about 20 minutes into the movie.
We are not in the center of a large deaf community....I very rarely see Deaf people signing...our local schools mainstream Deaf students and it is a very small population...we are not near a school for the Deaf. But the theatre is very high tech...they even have machines to purchase your ticket via debit or credit card and in fact only have two cashiers on duty, encouraging patrons to use the machines.
I have a brother who is Deaf...he lives in another part of the country and he is not able to enjoy theatre movies yet but I am encouraged that maybe someday his theatres will have this feature or similar features.
Closed captioning can be hit or miss. Usually on DVDs it's pretty tight, though they do abridge dialogue because most folks can't read as fast as they can hear.
Closed captioning done live, for news or sports, tends to be a lot more sloppy, because typing 250 words per minute means a lot of working phonetically, and there isn't time to go back and correct. I sometimes wonder how helpful those captions are to deaf folk, because while it's pretty easy for me to recognize the homophones, someone who learned English as a written language first might not immediately spot that "way" should be "weigh."
As far as subtitles go, the best I've ever seen are the ones from the 1990-ish Gerard Depardieu version of Cyrano de Bergerac. I knew just enough French to catch spots where the translation wasn't very precise, but the English text was in rhyming couplets, as was the French dialogue -- it captured the flavor of the writing better than a more literal translation could have.
I have a brother who is Deaf...he lives in another part of the country and he is not able to enjoy theatre movies yet but I am encouraged that maybe someday his theatres will have this feature or similar features.
Oh, I'm sure it will get even better -- it wouldn't be too difficult to send the captions wirelessly, to have a heads-up display in a pair of glasses that deaf patrons could use so others wouldn't see the captions. The technology exists. It just has to get cost-effective enough that it's commonplace.