02.10.08
Not ready for prime time
This morning I attempted to “watch” two video stories (called “podcasts”), one on the New York Times and one on Salon.com. The former had interesting footage of New York City’s Pakistani newspapers and the latter was Joan Walsh’s take on “Which Democrat can beat McCain”?
But I could make head nor tail of either — because there was no captioning or text to help me or other deaf people follow the audio.
Every broadcast television news operation in the country uses closed captions. It’s the law. Sooner or later the law probably will extend to Internet news operations, at least domestic ones, but I’ve seen not one glimmering of a voluntary step on the part of Internet news and opinion providers — even the liberal ones you’d think would be in the forefront of the movement.
Deaf people take captioning seriously. So much so, in fact, that the grassroots of deaf culture are rumbling with anger over less than half the Super Bowl commercials being closed captioned. It’s a matter of equal access to information, say those who feel strongly about it. The more practical, like me, wonder why energy should be expended to make it easier for salesmen to get inside our houses and huckster stuff we don’t need.
Perhaps proper access to news, however, is something we can all agree on. And until Salon and Slate and the Times and everybody else start providing captions for their news and opinion podcasts, the Internet is not yet serving everyone fairly.
