WASHINGTON - Viral videos may be good for sharing ideas and spreading funny foreign pop hits, but they are leaving millions of Deaf and Hearing Impaired people out of the loop.
Online video is becoming a more ubiquitous part of American life. Netflix videos made up one-third of online data used in the United States last year. YouTube expects 90 percent of online traffic to be video in the next few years. By 2016, Cisco estimates, 1.2 million minutes of video will be streamed or downloaded every second.
That video explosion has been great for small-film and TV producers, who are able to reach an audience without a big studio budget, and fans of niche programming. But in some ways, it has left the deaf and hard-of-hearing community starting from scratch after years of advocating for captions on traditional television.
“We could be back to square one,” said Christian Vogler, director of the Technology Access Program at Gallaudet University.
The rise of e-mails, instant messages and social media was a godsend to the Deaf and Hard of Hearing community, which embraced the new, text-based ways to communicate.
“In the mid- to late 1990s, it was close to the ideal medium,” Vogler said. But as the Web evolved to include more video, he said, old barriers to communication resurfaced. ... Read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/growth-of-online-video-leaves-deaf-community-in-the-dark/2012/11/28/4048e4ac-389c-11e2-8a97-363b0f9a0ab3_story.html
Support #CaptionTHIS
Sign the petition at:
http://www.change.org/petitions/tell-cnn-to-start-providing-equal-access-to-their-online-videos
To send letters to different companies and learn more about this:
http://blog.deafpolitics.org/2012/05/captionthis-social-media-movement.html
More Benefits of captions:
http://curbcut.net/accessibility/the-benefits-of-captions-legit/
Collaborative for Communication Access via Captioning:
http://ccacaptioning.org/
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