Jun 08
27
Obama & Captioning for the Deaf Update
As some of you may know, I’ve been in contact with the Obama administration regarding captioning all of their video media on their website. I got a response from them:
Dear Friend,
Thank you for contacting us about closed captioning of video on our website. We appreciate your message, and work hard to make our website accessible.
To find a selection of videos with closed captioning, please click here:
http://www.barackobama.com/closedcaptioning/
Thank you again for contacting us.
Sincerely,
Obama for America
—————————–
Paid for by Obama for America
While I’m grateful that they caption most of the media, I find it objectionable that they find it necessary to shunt deaf viewers off to a separate unorganized page full of captioned media. I would think it’d be more preferable to the deaf community that they instead just make captioning available on all of their media in their own respective locations, so deaf people can read the relevant articles, and view the media in the same location.
A reader, Bill Creswell (who is also a captioner himself) pointed out:
I believe he has to request Project readOn to have his videos captioned.
Probably means that the most current videos haven’t been captioned yet.
Then he went on to cite an interview in where Project readOn stated:
For instance, the political partners on our site have formed a simple ‘business agreement’ with us whereby we will caption 100 minutes of content for free, and then after that point they pay a modest amount to cover the costs of the captioning. This offer is open to any candidate, so we believe there is no reason that EVERY candidate shouldn’t use our service! We can’t caption their content without their permission, so this is an arrangement that we feel can benefit everyone.
Wait… “modest”? Now I’m wondering just exactly how much this “modest” amount is. But even then, their claim that they cannot caption their media without their permission; I’d have to beg to digress. The election-related media, if released by candidates via their websites, are pretty much released into the public domain. Add into the fact that the video media that they put on their website gives viewers not just the ability to obtain a link to the video, but also an embed code that would allow any user to embed the videos on their own respective websites. To me, that’s pretty much all any captioner would need to verify that they have permission to add captioning to it. As long as the captioning was precisely captioned word-for-word, I see no reason why this would pose a legal hazard. So Project readOn’s claim is groundless. Then add in the fact that Project readOn adds their logo to the videos that they caption not just at the bottom of the video, but also in a large image at the end of the video. This constitutes as free advertising. Personally, I think the free advertising should be enough payment for them to caption it. Asking for monetary compensation WHILE adding advertising into the mix is very much so a highly questionable business practice.
I responded to Bill Creswell saying:
But still, if the television stations can run captioning even for the sections that are live, then I see no particular reason why they cannot caption the media on their site so the deaf can view those media at the same time as the hearing rather than being forced to wait until they get around to having it captioned. Perhaps they should hire an in-house captioner?
Don’t get me wrong, I sincerely appreciate their even captioning it at all, most candidates usually don’t bother. But still, I’d like to encourage Obama’s administration to adopt a “full prompt accessibility” approach rather than a partial one.
A big thank you goes out to Bill Creswell for shining more light on the captioning situation.
In any case, I was going to send an email response to the Obama administration saying pretty much what I just said in this blog post, but I saw the “To:” field saying: “Obama for America Correspondence Team no-reply@barackobama.com”. Wait a minute, no-reply? Meaning they don’t accept email replies? Crazy. I went to their website, and sent it from their form. As soon as I get a response, I’ll be sure to let you know.
I’d also like to add that a reader going by the alias of MM posted a comment saying:
Our British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, launched a blog site for the ‘people’ to ask him questions, that wasn’t captioned or deaf accessible either, we wrote and asked why, he never responded, join the club!
Wow. Guess this is a global problem… Even so, I think that if we put our combined effort into it, we can make alot of changes for the good of the deaf community!
