Accessibility

Deaf and online videos

One thing I noticed while watching videos online (YouTube, MetaCafe, Google Video, etc) is that there is rarely any text accompanying the video. It isn’t much of an issue if it’s a prank video or a Japanese game show, but when there’s a lot of speaking parts, there’s rarely any captioning.
I wonder what hearing impaired people do. Do they have software that automatically close caption the audio? If not, they must feel left out.

Like this story?

Join 90 others and make a one-time donation.
Join 148 others and make a monthly donation.
Join 180 others and subscribe to my monthly email newsletter.

By Kim Siever

I live in Lethbridge with my spouse and 5 of our 6 children. I’m a writer, focusing on political news, social issues, and the occasional poem. My politics are radically left. I recently finished writing a book debunking several capitalism myths. My newest book writing project is on the labour history of Lethbridge.

I’m also dichotomally Mormon. And I’m a functional vegetarian: I have a blog post about that somewhere around here. My pronouns are he/him, and I’m queer.

View Archive

3 replies on “Deaf and online videos”

One of my biggest gripes with the whole “videoconferencing fad”. Sure, you can record a VC session, but the information saved in that video file is not accessible, searchable or in any way useful.
Maybe the Alberta government will get over it sooner or later. It sure is a good way to spend a lot of money though.