** If you’re on twitter, please something on this and post http://tinyurl.com/cchange and include #cchange in the post as well. **
Dear President-Elect Obama (And technical crew)
We greatly appreciate your efforts for accessibility, and the sentiments that you expressed on your site. We understand that transcripts are generally considered “adequate” accommodations for the Deaf and hard of hearing… However, I’d like to point something out that might not have occurred to you or to anyone on your staff.
If you are communicating to the American people using video, the way you are on change.gov, transcripts are worthless.
Perhaps that sounds a bit harsh. But it’s true. Transcripts are worthless. A speech, an address, a video appeal to the American People is not meant to be an article or the written word. They are different formats. A transcript is devoid of a good 45% of meaning for Deaf people. We rely as heavily on facial expressions and the pacing of words as most people rely on tone of voice. We read a person’s face as we read the closed captioning, alternating between lipreading and text. Between your words and your expressions.
We fought long and hard to bring closed captioning to most television shows, just in time for the internet to take over and destroy our efforts. Very little video on the web is captioned or accessible. The technology advances have catapulted us back into the dark ages of accessibility in many ways.
This does not have to be.
Adobe has added closed captioning features to Flash, and the service that you use: Youtube, has recently announced closed captioning made easy. Please take advantage of this feature.
Over 10% of the population has a hearing impairment. On top of that, many people have speech processing disorders and find that closed captions assist them in understanding what they are hearing. On top of that, many Americans speak English as a second (or third or fourth) language and find that being able to read along with what they hear helps them to better understand.
Closed captioning is tremendously valuable to a huge demographic. Please open your videos up to everyone that wishes to watch them. Please lead the Internet back in the direction of accessibility.
Thank you.
Write to the Obama team here: http://change.gov/page/s/contact and request that they close caption their videos. Transcripts were fine, but now closed captioning has come to the web and it’s time for the web to catch up.
* The videos referenced are those at http://change.gov/newsroom/entry/your_weekly_address_from_the_president_elect/
* The closed caption feature of YouTube is detailed here: http://www.youtube.com/t/captions_about
* You can view what people are saying about this either in the comments below, or on twitter here: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23cchange
* We in no way blame Obama or his administration for the lack of the closed captioning. It is a new feature of YouTube and flash in general. However, it is a feature that they NEED to make use of.
