Deafness+and+Internet+Video+Access

Deafness and Internet Video Access By Rachel Nelson, RN (from personal experience and interview of 2 deaf friends) At first thought you might think that deaf people don’t encounter difficulties when they surf the web, but to simply shut off the speakers on your computer would not give you the complete picture of a deaf person’s experience with the Internet. First I’d like to point out that deaf people have their own culture, so there is a cultural barrier between hearing and non-hearing people…try telling your best joke to a deaf person and see….and it’s the same the other way around! On the internet, this gap between hearing and non-hearing world results in a comprehension difficulty for the deaf. A deaf person who signs (ASL, American Sign Language in US) is a person who speaks another language, with another alphabet and a different syntax. The English language as hearing people write it is in fact a second language for deaf people. Deaf at birth people don’t have the natural reflex to associate written and spoken language. Sign language is based on simple sentences often without conjugation. For example, to say “I am writing on the internet” is translated in ASL by “me” “write” “internet”. Because of that, reading English can be difficult for a deaf person. Accessibility provided with a written support is completely different from the communication method of the deaf which is entirely visual. This concept is hard to grasp but is fundamental. Fortunately, this gap is not as wide as it was with the new generation of deaf people who now have more support in both languages early on. Video access is a major problem for deaf people on the internet. This is a paradox, because video is also a way to improve accessibility for deaf people on the internet. Video sites such as Youtube ([]), Dailymotion ([]) or even MySpaceTV ([]) widely attract deaf people because all is visual. But above that, not all what is there is accessible. A video can be made accessible with subtitles or even better have a version in sign language. However, it’s very time consuming and fastidious to add subtitles to a video. Translating and synchronizing the dialogues and sounds is a job that is not doable by just anyone. On top of that, this job cannot be automated, it requires a real person. By doing a Google search for “you tube captions”, I did find a couple of sites that help lay people create captions. The most user-friendly was [], where you paste the URL of the YouTube video you want to add captions to. Then you add the transcript line by line. How long do you think it would take for the ordinary person wanting to post a video? Because of this, most videos do not contain an accessible alternative to sounds. Students sponsored by IBM created the software program [|SiSi] (Say it, Sign it): it uses voice recognition to translate in sign language. This is a real promising application but it is still limited, because facial expression is an integral part of sign language. Furthermore, sign language is not universal. There are a lot of differences between the signing of different languages. For example, ASL (American Sign Language) is entirely different than LSF (Langue des Signes française, French sign language). Maybe that is why SiSi was originally created in 2007, and nothing more came from it since then. Still, it is hope for the future, as the major downside to transcribing videos is that it is entirely manual. Advancement in technologies will hopefully allow automatic translation one day soon.