Obama & Captioning for the Deaf UpdateFiled Under: Deafness, Politics
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 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!
Tags: Barack Obama, Captioning, Deafness, Politics, Presidency, video
- Permalink
- Don
- 27 Jun 2008 1:31 PM
- Comments (8)
June 27th, 2008 at 4:07 pm
When captioning is done “for profit”, to make money on it, it takes 1hr/3 minutes of video.
Captioning a 30 minute speech without a transcript takes 10 hours, plus or minus depending on quality review, etc. (transcript can cut that time in half).
Probably $100-200? I would think in politics, that would payoff.
(As for legality, I’ve wondered how much attention I might be able to get, if some giant media company wanted to take down my captioned movie trailers! Wouldn’t that be fun!)
June 27th, 2008 at 4:15 pm
Hmm, thanks for the numbers. Still doesn’t change that all media needs to be captioned and equal access be provided for all. Perhaps I’m just too much of an idealist?
As for the attention; I suspect no self-respecting giant media company would issue a C&D order to you just for captioning their trailers. It would look very, very bad for them.
But on the other hand, if you were to caption entire movies and redistribute them, then that’d be a whole another story. Although if you were to caption movies, sell them, and pay royalties to the media company, I suspect they would be just fine with it. As long as they get a cut of the money, I don’t think they would care.
But yes, I agree with you, it’d be definitely fun to do the legal tango with a giant, especially when they aren’t in the right.
June 28th, 2008 at 12:30 am
There are several thousands, if not hundred thousands, of deaf people currently living in the good old US of A, so it would make more sense to caption their media files, because:
1) It would enlighten us on our knowledge about our candidates (yes this comment goes to anybody who’s a possible candidate for presidency)
2) It may score them some votes. ;p
Grant
June 29th, 2008 at 2:26 am
The reason they can’t have captioned media and uncaptioned media on the same page is because they’re using Flash. Flash doesn’t have a captioning feature. They can record video and play it. The work around is to have two sets of videos. Why it can’t all be on the same page, I don’t know, but from the looks of it if they were on the same page you’d find a reason to complain about that, too.
One thing project readOn didn’t mention is that no Republican candidate took them up on their offer.
June 29th, 2008 at 9:34 am
Actually, there’s a free service that will let people caption flash videos (such as YouTube, etc) easily. They just tell it the text, time to display it, and the duration for the display. That’s it.
It’s how Bill Creswell has captioned the videos so far.
http://www.overstream.net/
So all they need is to hire a captioner, train the person in how to use overstream, and that’s it. Problem solved. Best part? The only thing that cost them is the captioner himself.
Edit: I’d like also to add that it’s also possible to add text to flash; it isn’t that hard, I’ve done it before. It’s also possible to make it so if a viewer clicks a button (CC), the flash video would then start reading from a text file containing the captions. If they set it up via the button and text file way, then from that point on, all a captioner would need to do is open a text file, and put captions there in a specific format. There’s many, many ways to accomplish them.
What’s preventing them is simply laziness and the desire to avoid having to pay a captioner to do the captioning in the first place.
June 30th, 2008 at 3:36 pm
Hi Don –
Along with deaf advocates Howard Rosenblum and Karen Peltz-Strauss, I serve on Obama’s disability policy committee. We agree that it is best to have the videos already captioned when they are first released, and there are efforts underway to connect the campaign with the best available resources to make this happen. The goal is to have captioning options that will provide full and effective information to all viewers as these videos are made publicly available.
Please feel free to visit Obama’s Americans with disabilities blog: http://my.barackobama.com/page/content/dahome/ and post your comments or questions. Likewise, I can be directly reached at jeff_rosen@comcast.net.
Thanks for your comments on the issue. Your support helps us all move forward together, in keeping with Obama’s vision of an inclusive society.
Jeff Rosen
July 2nd, 2008 at 4:42 pm
Hey Jeff, I bet you could easily train campaign volunteers.
But thanks for your comment, and your efforts!
July 2nd, 2008 at 5:25 pm
Jeff-
Thanks for your comment. It’s appreciated to know the Obama campaign is working towards making it so all videos will be released with caption at the same time the videos are first released, instead of deaf people being forced to play catch up.
There however is one thing you guys need to work on: shunting us off to a separate page that’s badly organized is NOT inclusive. Even if you made the page organized, it’d still not be inclusive because deaf people would be forced to go to that page instead of just watching the video anywhere they’re embedded.
Would it be possible for you to make it more inclusive by having all videos have a button that’d turn on/off captioning, and embed that video as the default for all articles/pages? I know Hulu.com does it, so it should be very possible.
Jeff, thanks for commenting on the article, by the way! Your feedback is certainly appreciated!