Pono Tokioka’s take on the new “Star Wars” movie — “It was awesome” — was largely in step with popular and critical reception of the film.

More significantly, Tokioka’s actual experience of the film was also, for the first time ever, mostly the same as the rest of the theater-going public.

Tokioka, 20, was among about 100 hearing and visually impaired individuals who gathered at Consolidated Theatres Ward 16 on Saturday afternoon for the first legally mandated open-captioning, audio-description public movie screening in the nation.

“I enjoyed everything I saw,” Tokioka said via an American sign language interpreter. “It was awesome to be able to follow along with the movie like everyone else.”

The screening of “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” was the culmination of a decade-long effort on the part of the Aloha State Association of the Deaf and other organizations and individuals that advocate for broader and more substantive inclusion of deaf, hard-of-hearing, deaf-blind and visually impaired people in public spaces and came as a result of legislation introduced by Tokioka’s father, state Rep. James Tokioka (D, Wailua-Hana- maulu-Lihue).

The bill, signed by Gov. David Ige in May, mandates that any motion picture theater with at least two locations in the state is required to provide open captioning and descriptive narration, upon request, during at least two showings per week of each motion picture shown at the theater for one week or more.

The law took effect Friday.

“It’s a testament to the people of Hawaii that we were able to become the first state in the nation to do this,” said Colin Whited, deaf and hard-of-hearing specialist with the Research Corp. of the University of Hawaii. “It was a community push.”

Unlike closed captioning, which requires deaf or hard-of-hearing audiences to wear special glasses to see specially embedded text on the screen or to read from a monitor affixed to the seat in front of them, open captioning provides a full transcript of the dialogue on-screen, visible to the entire audience.

Descriptive narration allows those with visual impairments to listen to verbal descriptions of visual content.

For Pono Tokioka, who had given up on watching movies at the theater, the new accommodations are game-changing.

“My dad would try to get me to go to movies, but I’d say no,” Tokioka said. “Why waste money going to the theater when I wouldn’t be able to understand what was going on or enjoy myself? Now I’ll probably go to a lot more movies.”

The Tokiokas are well versed in fighting for fair inclusion.

As a Little League Baseball player, Tokioka made it to an all-star playoff game only to have his father, who had been serving as his interpreter in the dugout, banned from assisting him. The family complained, and the U.S. Justice Department subsequently ruled that PONY Baseball/Softball Inc. had violated the Americans With Disabilities Act. PONY later settled with the family and rewrote its rules to allow sign-language interpreters in its dugouts.

Tokioka, a gifted all-around athlete, is a member of the University of Hawaii golf team.

Whited said the timing was right as the previously prohibitive cost of burning captions directly onto individual frames of film has given way to simple, inexpensive digital captioning. The effort also gained the support of fellow Kauai legislator Rep. Derek Kawakami (D, Hanalei-Princeville- Kapaa), who tried using the special closed-captioning glasses and found them lacking.

Whited, a graduate of Gallaudet University, the renowned private university for students who are deaf or hard of hearing, said the new law could directly benefit the 190,442 Hawaii residents who have hearing difficulties and inspire other states to enact similar legislation.