Web Directions

Deafness — our next big accessibility challenge?

• In: Blog
• By:Maxine
• August 13, 2008
• Leave a response

Further to John’s post on Lisa’s arti­cle on A List Apart — Deafness and the User Experience — I just wanted to point out a lit­tle ini­tia­tive we have started over the last cou­ple of weeks here at Web Directions.

We’ve been pub­lish­ing pod­casts after our events for some years now, but it wasn’t until a deaf reader got in touch a few weeks back and enquired about the pos­si­bil­ity of tran­scrib­ing these audio record­ings that I thought about how alien­at­ing pre­sent­ing con­tent in this way could really be. A clas­sic instance of expe­ri­enc­ing the world through your own prism I guess.

Anyway, I did a bit of hunt­ing around and found an Australian com­pany — Smart Docs — who were able to do tran­scrip­tions of 1 hour ses­sions for around $125. Which seemed pretty rea­son­able, though I guess it’s going to add up over two days and three tracks of con­tent — any organ­i­sa­tions out there keen to help us spread a bit of good­will by becom­ing our “Transcription Sponsor”? :)

So we tri­alled Smart Docs with one of our most pop­u­lar ses­sions from last year — Scott Berkun’s The Myths of Innovation. They got an accu­rate tran­scrip­tion back to me with a 24 hour turn­around, which I’ve since man­aged to get up at the site with the help of Joe Clark — thanks Joe! You can find the tran­script here — new and improved print style sheet com­ing soon I promise!

With so much video and audio con­tent com­ing online, as Lisa hints, deaf­ness really is on the rise as the next big acces­si­bil­ity chal­lenge for the web. How’s your organ­i­sa­tion going to respond?

5 responses to “Deafness — our next big accessibility challenge?”:

1. • By:Lachlan Hardy
   • August 13th, 2008
   

   That’s fan­tas­tic news, Maxine. Thank you!

2. • By:Benson
   • August 13th, 2008
   

   Excellent stuff Maxine. In fact, I per­son­ally always pre­fer tran­scripts over pod­casts, as it is more effec­tive for me to read than lis­ten. I hope WD08 will have this.

3. • By:User-Centered Design and Web Accessibility Blog - AniktoBlog » Blog Archive » Web Accessibility for the Hearing Impaired
   • August 16th, 2008

   […] full of great resources and exam­ples, and I encour­age every­one to check it out. You might also find Maxine Sherrin’s post of inter­est. Having just been inter­viewed via pod­cast, it cer­tainly occurs to me that podcast […]

4. • By:Sveta
   • October 21st, 2008
   

   Thanks, Maxine, for post­ing the great arti­cle. I’m glad that you started post­ing tran­scripts along with podcasts.

   Benson, thanks, for shar­ing your view as a hear­ing per­son about your pref­er­ence for tran­scripts over pod­casts. So it is not just us deaf and hard of hear­ing who ben­e­fit from tran­scripts. According to COAT Position Statement on video cap­tion­ing (it applies to audio tran­scrip­tions as well):

   “… Who will ben­e­fit [from cap­tions]? Over 100 mil­lion Americans, includ­ing 28 mil­lion indi­vid­u­als with hear­ing loss, 30 mil­lion peo­ple for whom English is a sec­ond lan­guage, 27 mil­lion illit­er­ate adults, 12 mil­lion chil­dren learn­ing how to read and 4 mil­lion reme­dial readers. …”

   Not to men­tion mil­lions more worldwide..

   Examples of those other peo­ple are my par­ents and for­eign friends with per­fect hear­ing who also find cap­tion­ing for TV use­ful since English isn’t their first lan­guage. They also say it’s eas­ier for them to read writ­ten English than to try to under­stand it in spo­ken format.

   Transcripts would greatly ben­e­fit web­site own­ers as well since they improve the site’s search ranking.

   I did my acces­si­bil­ity pre­sen­ta­tion at a recent con­fer­ence cov­er­ing all those issues.

5. • By:Sveta
   • October 22nd, 2008
   

   Another thing to empha­size about impor­tant ben­e­fits of tran­scripts over pod­casts. Transcripts are more flex­i­ble than pod­casts in terms of han­dling the speed of receiv­ing information:

   - It’s not pos­si­ble to fast for­ward pod­casts or slow down speech of some­one who’s mum­bling or speak­ing fast. If you want to lis­ten to the full speech, you would have to lis­ten for the exact amount of time the speaker was talk­ing for. Also, you can’t see where in pod­cast you can lis­ten the spe­cific sec­tion of speech.

   - It’s eas­ier to han­dle the pace of read­ing tran­scripts. Depending on your pref­er­ence, you can read either fast or slow. You can eas­ily find the sec­tions of the text to reread with­out guess­ing where it is.

   - While text ver­sions ben­e­fits those with hear­ing loss most, they are use­ful for any­one else.

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