The Media Accessibility Bungee

After spending over a year planning and building our new Minneapolis office, then coordinating a move that saw absolutely zero downtime in our closed captioning and video description operations, it was time for a vacation! Someplace warm and quiet, where the Internet doesn’t exist yet and there are no cell phone towers…

While waiting for an inter-island flight at a small Hawaiian airport, Suzanne mentioned to me, “Hey Max, we’re boarding.” I asked her how she knew since we were away from the gate behind a soundproof glass wall and there was no gate announcement I could hear. She said that she heard some mumbling, Charlie Brown type talk, so she looked in that direction and she saw a big TV screen that was simply an open captioned version of the voice announcements being made at the same time. How cool is that? Why isn’t that everywhere?

Our society has become more diverse, and therefore more supportive of accessibility services. This is a good thing.

Accessibility is becoming mainstream. Go to any sports bar or work out studio, and many of the televisions are displaying captions. Airport announcements not only help people with sensory impairments, but works great for people who aren’t paying attention, speak a different language (you can still make out flight numbers and seat numbers no matter what language you use). More subtle examples include the move to text-based communications. 15 years ago, businesses lived on the phone. Now transactions are more likely to take place over email, instant messaging, and even text messaging – all which are more easily accessible to deaf and hard of hearing individuals. This is another good thing.

With all these great reasons to use captioning everywhere, accessibility remains a moving target. Now that (as of January 1, 2008) the FCC requires captioning of 75% of all programming created before 1998 (think re-runs of I Dream of Jeannie or Beverly Hillbillies), our attention is shifting away from video on television to video on the Internet, which currently has little to no accessibility. This is NOT a good thing.

Consider these numbers:

• In addition to the 28 to 32 million Americans
  who are deaf or hard-of-hearing, we have
• the 30 million Americans who are learning
  English as a second language
• 1 in 3 Americans over 65 who have some type of hearing loss - this is the fastest-growing population in the country (over 36 million today)
• the as many as 45 million children and adults
  who are learning to read!

Consider how the Internet is becoming the go-to source for video information, and you can imagine how many people are being left out of this new “information revolution.”

And I haven’t even talked about the needs of the members of the blind and low-vision communities. That’s for another day.