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I am deaf too and I echo the sentiments of the article. I’ve found Microsoft teams vital for me as it has auto captions enabled. Zoom doesn’t have this, so we have shifted away from using zoom completely.
Back in pre covid times, customer calls were done in a room over a conference speaker phone. I would be totally lost and would need to rely on my colleagues to help.
With Microsoft teams, I can run customer calls myself, relying on the captions (and the patience of the customer).
Massive thanks to Microsoft for spearheading accessibility. I hope you guys see this.
The first time I was invited into a Google Meet conference, the captions were on by default. I was impressed at how well it was doing in real time. I've seen closed captions with hired human operators during live events that didn't do as well as what I was seeing. Watching the captions disappear as the backspace was used to make a correction has always made live captions so human to me.
One thing that might help you is the Google Recorder app. It has live speech to text and you can prop your phone next to your laptop running Zoom. It's not ideal but can help make the meeting a bit easier to follow.
Can confirm... a phone running Google's Live Transcribe propped up next to my laptop is even better for me than Google Meets captions because you can see the history. Will have to try Google Recorder.
I use hearing aids and there is still a bug in Microsoft Teams when you connect via Bluetooth. The ring tone is super loud despite adjusting volume. Other people have complained months back and it still is not resolved. Fortunately my hearing is good enough that I can put headphones on top of my hearing aids to avoid this problem.
I have this problem with Bose SoundSport headphones and FaceTime Audio. The ring and answer tones are often painfully loud. Over three years and several firmware updates, it's still not fixed.
I think Bose has become unable to focus on user experience. This is shown by: 1) their decision to remove physical buttons, 2) ignoring counterfeit products sold on Amazon, and 3) failing to make their $350 bluetooth headphones pause music when you take them off.
I take the last point as a feature. I don't want the music to stop when I put the headset on my shoulders.
That's fantastic and eye-opening. I imagine the next leap will be language translation and with that. The prospect of having support calls with anybody irrespective of language barriers is getting within reach.
Hmm, about a year ago when I was on Zoom meetings we could get a transcript that was generated of the whole meeting, along with a recording of the meeting.
Was this feature removed at some point? One of my coworkers would export the meeting conversation and save it in slack. While it wasn't always perfect with the captioning, it worked well enough!
Transcript and captions are different
Captions are real time anD allow at least some element of inclusive participation.
A transcript is not really accessible
Ah! Thanks for the distinction! I couldn't remember if the transcription was happening in real time during the call, or if we just exported it afterwards. I hope the Zoom team adds real time soon!
One of my friends joined a foreign multinational and basically survives by the captions as well. Good guy Microsoft
I work with a very international team and multiple people have accents too thick to understand. I've found that Teams and Google Meet understand them better than I do. The captioning is a godsend.
I worked for a company where our accessibility engineer was blind. He once took us through his world; speakers setup so we could hear his screen reader and get a feel for how he navigates websites.
I remember him starting the presentation saying, "Can everyone see this? Good because I can't."
> “Can everyone see this? Good because I can't."
That is a powerful statement that requires no explanation. I love it.
I'm a (hearing) son in an all-deaf family, and am a bit tired to wait for every single service to become accessible.
Why not just be platform-agnostic? It's the same problem that has been going on for non-captioned videos for years.
If a captioning service is going to be exclusive to only Google Meet or Teams, then by definition, it's not inclusive.
So when we come on Zoom with my parents, they use Ava
to caption what I say with their speakers on.
It looks like a caption bar, floating on top of the screen, so when I share my screen they can still see captions.
My dad started using Ava at work where they use GoToMeeting. They just won't move to Zoom easily so he gets access without having to shift the whole company on it.
The software also separates who says what neatly if you share a link in the chat and people connect to it. Also voices out what's typed on the other end.
I'm going to take this as an excuse to ask some questions about how the hearing impaired use video chat:
How much does the video component help? I'd assume that most modern video chat solutions are adequate for sign language (but you know what they say about assumptions!). I've heard that reading lips over video is difficult. Is this a case where it's possible to read maybe half of what people say, or is it just impossible to read anything?
What happens when a deaf person receives an unexpected call/message when they're not looking at their PC or handheld? Is vibration from a mobile device usually enough? Are there any visual systems for a desktop to signal the user at a distance? (I'm thinking of something like the flashing light alarm clocks.)
Is communication via sign language over video chat feasible with a mobile device? I honestly don't know how much can be communicated with only one hand free. If one hand isn't enough, is propping the device up on a stable surface enough to be able to communicate this way? (Common sense says that at this point everyone would just be texting, but sometimes you just need that human connection.)
I don't have any practical need for any of these answers. It's just something I've been curious about for a while.
I ignore all calls to my phone, my wife has set my voicemail up to say I'm deaf, to text me instead.
I've got a rather expensive system set up to every doorbell, and smoke alarm in the house that also functions as my alarm clock in which it'll vibrate the mattress (just a small circular vibration device to place under the bed).
Lip-reading over video is good enough _IF_ you can hear enough, so because I have a cochlear implant I can do both and that's usually good enough. Without the processor on, I'm profoundly deaf - so video would be quite useless. (thus the reasoning for a vibrating smoke alarm thingy).
I keep my phone on vibrate-only.
At the end of the day I'm a little different because I rely on my cochlear implant and for some people in some communities (see deaf vs Deaf), there's quite a lot of stigma.
Ok a lot of education needed that go off topic :)
We say deaf & hard-of-hearing please, not hearing-impaired.
Lip reading is hard, period. Over video makes it harder when network connection isn’t great, and more people speak, so mostly difficult yeah.
Flashes / vibration are common alerts yes. I prefer flash since you might not touch the surface that vibrates.
And yes one-handed sign over video is very frequent but maybe best for 1-1 or familiar groups because indeed you can lose a bit in precision/fluidity. If you want to be accessible over video, find a stable place and sign with dark colored shirt so contrast is better ;)
> We say deaf & hard-of-hearing please, not hearing-impaired.
Whoops, my apologies.
> Flashes / vibration are common alerts yes.
A quick search reveals that there's a mishmash of different ways to use a phone's flash for notifications. Are there any equivalent options for desktop/laptop systems?
In any case, thanks for taking the time to engage with me.
> We say deaf & hard-of-hearing please, not hearing-impaired.
Which is different all around the world.
The captions feature of Google Hangouts is great if you can't hear well, although sometimes it is akin to watching a "bad lip reading" video on You Tube which I'm sure nobody else notices because I'm the only one with them turned on.
The TDD service hasn't changed since the '90s (1890? 1990? debatable) so I avoid it. It might have been amazing in the '60s but it is a punishment to use today compared to chat, messaging, e-mail, almost everything else.
Most banks don't seem to get this and it is precious few that offer secure messaging as an option - First National Bank of Omaha is the best I've found. Citibank has excellent support via chat but all of their financial products are absolutely the worst and their fee structure should be considered usury. CapitalOne has amazing financial products but no provisions for the hard of hearing - if you send them a letter they will send you one right back saying "Call our 800 number" unless you explicitly write that you are writing them because you can't use the phone. Thanks, CapitalOne, really helpful.
The absolute worst is Amalgamated Bank, as soon as they found out I couldn't hear they closed my account and sent me my funds via cashiers check - two months days later.
Hi Quinn! Coincidentally, I've been working on a sound visualizer which accurately translates sound to visuals, while preserving all the information and, what's way more important, it transfers the "sound symmetry" which we often refer to as "musical harmony". The visuals can be translated back to sound.
As someone with nearly perfect hearing and musical education background, I find the visuals oddly accurate when I also listen to the corresponding music. It can trivially distinguish human vowels, as those produce different recognizable shapes.
I've put together a few sample images and a live demo: check out "github soundshader" (the project that talks about ACFs). I'm really curious what you think about this.
Is there a reason you don't just link directly to
https://soundshader.github.io/
or
https://github.com/soundshader/soundshader.github.io
?
I tried doing just that not so long ago: HN promptly shadowbanned my account and my IP address.
If you send an email to hn@ycombinator.com the mods fix false positives like that pretty quickly.
Every mp3 and an attempt to use mic results in "AudioContext.createMediaStreamSource: Connecting AudioNodes from AudioContexts with different sample-rate is currently not supported" error message to appear in Firefox 82.0.2 on Windows 10.
Try adding `?sr=44.1` in the URL query to set custom AudioContext sample rate matching the mp3 file. Usually it's 44.1 kHz, so it's the default value. On desktop Ubuntu, both Chrome and Firefox can seamlessly rescale the sample rates, but I haven't tested the app anywhere else.
Fascinating stuff! I’m going to dig into it more soon. Thanks for sharing! I’ll be sure to follow up.
Clickable link
https://github.com/soundshader/soundshader.github.io
It would be awesome if there was a pre-populated example on the GitHub pages site. I’m on an iPhone Chrome right now and have no mp3s to try and the mic button didn’t do anything.
I've been thinking to do this, actually. However the mobile Chrome and Firefox don't seem to work yet, at least on Android. For example, mobile Chrome renders only a 1-pixel wide stripe moving upwards. It correctly changes color, so all the machinery around GLSL must be working, but I have no idea why the rest of the image is pitch black.
I've noticed that since everyone has gone remote, everyone wants to Zoom more. Things that could be a short discussion in Slack or a quick comment on a github PR are now a full-fledged Zoom meeting. I end up taking notes, which makes the meeting even more slow and awkward. If I were deaf, it would be impossible to do my job.
The impromptu 1:1 Zoom meeting is tech’s rediscovery of the telephone call. Those were a staple of office work for good reason. The alternative is typically a scheduled meeting, which feels much heavier. Phone calls also end when they’re done as opposed to filling an arbitrary block of time.
I’m sure this differs across people and companies, but in my experience a one-on-one Zoom meeting is often faster than the slack discussion would be.
It’s similar to walking over to your coworkers desk to chat for things that are too longwinded for slack but not worth a meeting.
It's faster, but it's also (from my experience) a bit more taxing and often a bit draining. Unless it needs to be resolved quickly or it's a particularly complex issue, I much prefer the relaxed back-and-forth of a slack chat.
I agree, those are good points. The art is definitely in knowing when to switch between zoom and slack, balancing all of these factors.
And balancing for each person the mental costs of solving the problem through Zoom or Slack, and/or their preferences for either of those avenues.
However, it may be less convenient for them when you do that.
So don't become Lumbergh from Office Space, and read the room/audience.
Use at your own discretion.
Same goes for using the /zoom in slack - if a back & forth is ensuing it may require a faster latency than slack can provide so a call which can upgrade to video/screenshare is nice.
Oh, I'm the last one to start a call like that, because I know how bad it is to get stopped in your tracks and diverted when you're on a roll. Not that calls and conversations can't be useful, I just... don't like it when people think that's the only way to communicate.
I'd love to see the data, but I suspect that number of meetings and hours lost that way increased when we switched to remote. Not that we had need to coordinate more, but the fact that the company was no longer constrained by the number of meeting rooms available. Now you could schedule any number of meetings at any time.
Before Covid, you had to look in the schedule to find an available room. If there was none, you had to postpone the meeting or try to do it informally.
If I was developing Teams or a similar software, I'd allow companies to institute virtual meeting rooms that would function like the real deal. You can do impromptu 1:1 calls, but anything more than that requires a virtual room with a schedule. Another thing that could be useful is productivity metrics of hours spent in meetings (it's possible it exists).
This is just due to lack of feedback. If I get sent a zoom invite and there isn't a clear reason I know of to accept , I always ask in chat if a meeting is necessary.
I find more than 75% of video meetings are worthless, and this system has worked well.
It’s been a practice of mine for years and several coworkers are only learning about it for the first time:
I either decline meetings with no agenda or nothing in the body, or leave them tentative and reply back with nothing but a question mark to the sender. Mostly decline.
Replying "?" to a meeting invite is pretty passive aggressive, holy cow.
It conveys more information than the request, while demanding less.
"Meeting, tomorrow, 11am" - "I need your time but can't be arsed to tell you why"
"?" - "What's this about, then?"
Personally, yes, I would respond with a full sentence. But it would mean the same thing, and doesn't do as good a job of discouraging the rude behavior.
At the same time, requesting a meeting with 0 information about the purpose is pretty rude. That kind of request is a pretty good indicator it's not going to be a productive meeting if the topic can't be concisely written.
i do this but would never reply with just a question mark (i'd politely decline or ask for additional context in order for me to attend). if i have no context for a meeting invite and it's lacking an agenda, i don't think it should fall to me to figure out what it is -- that's the onus of the organizer, in my opinion.
i am open with those i work with about this policy and i have never had anyone take issue with it, in fact i've gotten the opposite -- positive feedback and others adopting similar policies. i think a key part of this is openness and positive and direct communication, though.
I disagree. But I only send no-context zoom invites after the context has been discussed directly on slack or a previous meeting anyway so...
For me, it was fascinating to see how our interactions changed over the course of the call. Everyone became more expressive in physical space.
I found this to be extremely useful, even when talking to people with normal hearing on a video call. Because the call omits so much context that is obvious when talking in person, it helps to overact emotions, especially if you don't want to take valuable speaking bandwidth. (Or worse, talk over someone, which happens much less elegantly over video call.)
I took to overacting pretty immediately in the beginning of lockdowns, but noticed that I was one of the few doing it. And I am still not sure how to broach that conversation with people. "Hi, I notice that you're acting normally on this video call. It would be best for you to comically overact your emotions so that people can get a read on how you are reacting."
Some examples include nodding - moving almost from chin touching chest to staring at the ceiling, smiling - mouth wide enough to almost hurt, with a bit of space between the top and bottom rows of teeth, thumbs up - holding it right next to my head for 3+ seconds, and reconsidering something - hand over chin, almost covering mouth, with my entire head oriented up and away from the camera.
I've gotten good feedback on it, so I don't think it's just me being weird. But it does sound odd now that I've written the examples out.
For anybody interested the following equipment works the best:
1) Oticon hearing aids + TV streaming device connected to iMac via audio interface.
It streams the audio from the computer to the hearing aids .
2) Teams + captioning. In order the person needing to see the captioning to see it he has to initiate the meeting and sharing the link. The link never expires and could be saved in Notes from all members of the group. The members of the group needs to share the meeting time via other means for example email , text message.
Compared to Zoom, Google meetups Team has superior video, audio and captioning capabilities.
There are desktop and iOS versions of Teams. No way to use Otter reliably with hearing aid device because it requires Chrome browser and needs physical sound from the speakers to work. Internal networking the sound is not working.
3) Phone calls - CaptionCall. It is free service paid by the FEDeral government. You sign up and receive dedicated phone number which you enter in settings for call forwarding. When you are calling or somebody is calling you CaptionCall is intercepting the call and forwards it for machine learning+ person transcriber. This is the best combination.
4) Messaging across devices -WhastApp. No video or audio captioning in iOS so - using only messaging. Used for announcing Teams meeting.
All other solutions do not do anything to accommodate-WebEx, BlueJeans, etc.
Microsoft is having the best accommodation service - there is dedicated web site with free 24/7 support for people needing accommodation. One Teams account is just $5/month and the support is responding within several hours.
I love how many different approaches there are for setting things up!
One quick note about Otter: I’m using LoopBack to create virtual audio devices that let me feed the audio as an input source as well as play it through an output channel. That might work with the hearing aids.
(I use somewhat outdated Phonak Naida V SP’s – looking forward to the next gen that have better Bluetooth support.)
This is a great article and being deaf myself, I have very similar experiences. Some thoughts...
I'm a heavy Otter user and find it well worth the subscription - I used it a lot even in person, and have used it more since we all started working from home. We use Teams for most of our meetings and I always switch the captions on there; one or the other sometimes lags, but usually not both at once. For family video chats, we use Google Meet, and it's usually on par with Otter and Teams.
I have read a lot of positive comments of Google's Live Transcribe and Recorder apps, but can't evaluate them since I'm an iPhone user. Between this and the other hearing a11y features in recent Pixel phones, and me having one foot out of the Apple ecosystem anyway, I give serious thought to switching to a Pixel almost every year and one of these days I'll actually do it.
Worth mentioning: Google added the Pixel's Live Captions feature to Chrome and it's in the beta and main channels, but it's hidden behind a flag AND a setting, so you have to enable the flag, restart Chrome, and then confirm in settings that captions are turned on. I believe this is entirely on-device and it does work astonishingly well; I've used it on programming streams on Twitch and it handled the technical vocabulary better than I expected , if not flawlessly.
A US-centric point I should mention: for companies above a certain size, the Americans with Disabilities Act requires that they make reasonable accommodations for you. I have done this in the past to have a professional captioner. They're more accurate, but inconvenient to schedule, usually have a bit more lag, and very expensive ($125 an hour was about average when I last had to get quotes for this). Not everyone wants to make the accuracy tradeoff and that's fine - I understand their position - though I'm personally willing to because it makes it very easy to jump on a call with a coworker whenever I need to.
Quick notes on my setup: I have a 3.5mm splitter hanging off my work laptop's headphone jack. One side goes to a ReSound Multi-Mic (which includes a 3.5mm jack) to stream the audio to my hearing aid. The other side has a TRS-to-TRRS cable going into my iPhone (via the audio to lightning adapter) or iPad to provide an audio stream for Otter to work on. USB webcam provides the microphone. I typically use my iPad since I can set it up under the monitor my video call is running on and then I don't have to use screen space on my monitors to display the captions.
I really should write up a blog post about all of this, with photos.
We have tried both Meet and Zoom for the ASL class I am taking. Both are fine until the instructor needs to present a powerpoint. Zoom stops showing everyone's video. Not sure if there is a difference between Zoom desktop app and Zoom chrome extension.
For Meet, it is nice that the instructor can present from a tablet but there is no way to hid the presentation video so it is way too small to see everyone signing.
I am not a huge fan of a lot of Microsoft products, but I have been very pleasantly surprised by the Teams desktop app for video calls. With a decent sized screen, it seems to work pretty well at keeping everyone "present" on the screen, though I haven't experienced using it with people who only speak visually.
With the Zoom desktop app you can click a button on the top right to switch the view. This allows you to see the presentation and the gallery view at the same time (make sure to have a recent app version). With the mouse you can resize the view between presentation and videos if you like to make the videos bigger.
If you have two screens for Zoom you can keep one screen for screen share and see everyone else on the other. I think there might be a way to turn on this dual window approach on a single screen too so you can control how much screen real estate each gets.
Yeah: you can activate a floating gallery panel of video feeds.
Only with the native app. The same one that intentionally bypassed Mac security.
Zoom can show face video if you don't maximize the screen - the participants show up on top. Or use a 2nd monitor. Zoom was the first one to capitalize on 3 monitors - I've used a bidirectional share + participants on the 3rd screen.
I don't think it shows everyone at once though? Which is pretty important in an ASL class. I only have the chrome extension which doesn't support popping videos out to separate monitors.
Yeah I just exit full-screen mode. Then I can see the screen + anyone with video on and chat.
It's a feature of Zoom, meetings can be set up to force presenter control. I'm not sure if there's a way to allow individuals to bypass it, but it is something the meeting-creator can turn off.
Zoom also has an option to show the video in a second window to the shared screen if you enable multi screen mode. (You don't need two screens)
There's another really difficult challenge for hearing-impaired people not mentioned here: it's mentally exhausting to follow online meetings, even with captions. Hearing impaired people have to very intently while also trying to make sense of lagging/imperfect captions, and that's a high cognitive load to sustain for long periods.
Accented English is particularly challenging, because otter.ai (used in Zoom) has very poor accuracy with the most common accents we encounter in software engineering.
100% this. Sometimes it’s like driving at night in a rainstorm on a twisty road with occasional on-coming traffic.
Absolutely. This was actually something my team brought up—it was much more exhausting than usual, because it places such a heavier mental load on everyone. In my case at least, it’s still better than lip reading in large in-person meetings.
FYI, Zoom is getting built-in automated live captions very soon. It will be produced by Otter.ai, which already produces the recording transcriptions. With 3rd party live captions, there’s an option to see all the text in a sidebar so I assume it will also be possible with their automated live captions.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/zoom-meetings-you-can-now-add-...
I am not deaf and I love captions and subtitles.
I will often watch movies with them one, it might be that I grew up with them as my father is deaf; but I find they give me more information than speech alone.
I've been in hospital recently after suffering a large oil burn to my left arm, and part of my chest. As most of us probably know, wards get very noisy. I only ever used my cochlear implant processor when I'd see the team of doctors first thing in the morning, otherwise I'd just chill and watch my laptop with captions on.
Absolutely shocked me every time I'd turn my processor on and the world would roar into my ears. "How the fuck is anyone sleeping" I'd ask myself.
Me too, captions and subtitles allow me to watch videos while listening to music, or watch videos in public settings where I either didn't bring headphones or don't want to wear headphones, and allow me to watch 2 videos at the same time in which both of them are filled with 80% fluff and 20% content, as they usually are.
The same. I can hear faint noises just fine, and hear background noise when listening to headphones. I think it's related to my poor verbal skills.
I'm on the flip-side of this. I have enough hearing that it is only sometimes a barrier. But I have an associated speech impediment. Voice recognition is always garbled.
I'm not deaf, but I don't care what most people say - so having better zoom transcripts would make my life easier.
1. Mobile phone
2. Google Live Transcribe app
This is how I handle Zoom meetings as partially deaf. Its fairly accurate and plus you can use a second mobile too. Downside is that it will pick up everyone, including your voice.
I do the exact same thing as well. Since I am a federal employee, I tried
https://www.sprintrelay.com/federal
at first when we had dial-in conferences but it was hard at first - I requested that people start their sentences with their name and to whom they were talking like so: "This is Alice here, Bob, did you..".
We moved to Zoomgov and it was hard at times to get captioning scheduled so I moved back to using my phone (which is what I used pre-covid at our in-person meetings) with Live Transcribe. We have the host with OneNote open and everyone has submitted notes so we know the topics that are going to be covered and can use it as sort of meeting minutes for anyone else that missed the meeting or to review what topics were covered.
My hearing is mostly fine, but I've looked for decent options to use for dictation, and Live Transcribe is the closest I've found to one with enough precision _and_ speed to be tolerable to use as a replacement for typing...
I wonder if there's a way to build a video codec that does automatic lip detection and sends the lip data in much higher resolution than the rest of the stream?
Video codecs already do this, to a degree. One of the key uses of wavelet transforms.
This is effectively what Nvidia Maxine claims to do.
because I was relying on a transcript that was five seconds behind.
I get it's about many things, but I don't understand why there is a 5 second lag on what is a solved problem. Solved decades ago.
Is it patient concerns?
This is also about a business issue, transcripts of meetings go past accessibility, so I don't get why between the two reasons this isn't solved.
"we need to make work more inclusive for people living with disabilites" - statements like this are pretty popular, and they sound nice to the first order. However, I have never once seen a statement like this accompanied by a utilitarian/economic analysis of whether this would actually be socially beneficial given the (usually) small number of people involved compared to the (often) large cost of making the change. And whenever someone says "would this really be worth it", responses vary from "Wow, why do you hate the disabled?" to "You should be glad you're not disabled" - in any case, shaming the person asking this question rather than addressing the (reasonable) question.
About 2 in 1000 people in the US are deaf, and most of those are deaf due to old age, so they are not working anymore. I think it's very unlikely that the marginal optimum is to spend more money optimizing for this subset of users.
I would assume that there usually isn't an immediate economic benefit of doing so. Fortunately, we live in a society that is much more inclusive than it used to be. As Tim Cook said, "When we work on making our devices accessible by the blind, I don't consider the bloody ROI".
Aside from the monetary benefits (or lack thereof), if one product focuses on accessibility and another doesn't, the small subset of users who need those features may encourage or force a larger number of users to use the more accessible product. So long-term, I think there is a benefit, even aside from helping make society more inclusive.
This sort of commentary betrays a stiflingly first-order thought process.
Sure, being "more inclusive" is a benefit - this is included in any utilitarian or economic analysis of the change. However, instead of spending X marginal dollars being more inclusive to deaf people, you could also spend that money on any number of other outcomes (pick your pleasant-sounding cause: cancer research, homeless outreach, just making everyday people's lives a bit better).
If you don't understand how "monetary benefits" tie in to scalable social optimization, you should probably not offer opinions on which causes people (and companies) should put money into.
Also, keep in mind that you have ~zero skin in the game here, and Zoom has a lot, so you should lend a lot of credence to what they choose to do.
Easy to say if you're not disabled.
One day, you might be. Just be glad you won't be left behind.
Edit: If you want a purely numbers based analysis, well, you're not considering second-order effects. Investment in accessibility represents an investment in technology. ASR in meetings, for example, is a necessary first step towards good auto-translation.
You do realize you’re saying “It’s not worth including some people,” including those with hearing loss, as if their inclusion is worth less than everyone else.
Inclusive design recognizes that by simply recognizing the challenges the extreme ends of the spectrum of ability may be facing, you can design outcomes that create a better experience for everyone, not just those with permanent disabilities. It’s no harder or even necessarily more expensive to design for inclusion from the beginning—it’s a mindset that leads to better, more inclusive, and more human products.
Being charitable to centimeter, it sounds more like they're saying that their inclusion is more expensive than everyone else. And, well... it is.
That being said, the argument only works on purely utilitarian grounds. If you have any sense of deontological ethics, it kind of goes right out the window (even if you agree with the conclusion, the argument itself doesn't make much sense from a deontological viewpoint).
I do agree with this, and it’s one reason I’m a huge proponent of automated speech to text even if accuracy isn’t perfect. Having to bring in a third party to transcribe is expensive and exceptional and best when accuracy is crucial, or it’s serving a large audience. I’d rather we continue to push for better automated speech to text by default, everywhere.
I'm repeating this from below because it needs to be visible. Your statistics and conclusions are wrong. You're selling this fiction that deafness is just an "old persons" thing. You're cherry picking perhaps a statistic about people being totally deaf, but inclusion and accommodation doesn't just start when someone is fully deaf.
According to the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (see
https://www.nidcd.nih.gov/health/statistics/quick-statistics...
)...
_Among adults aged 20-69, the overall annual prevalence of hearing loss dropped slightly from 16 percent (28.0 million) in the 1999-2004 period to 14 percent (27.7 million) in the 2011–2012 period._
Partial hearing loss isn't the same as deafness and doesn't require the same interventions. You are being misleading.
I am partially deaf, have been so since the early 70’s, have had hearing aids for over 25 years, and have paid thousands of dollars out of pocket to “self accommodate”.
Do not tell me about my reality.
There is a very fine line between what you are saying and the attitude of a racist. You may not see it that way, but it’s true.
And I don’t know whatever rules apply here, but fuck off with this attitude.
Making things accessible has positive unintended consequences. Building curb ramps doesn’t just help people in wheelchairs, it also helps parents with strollers and tourists with luggage. Adding subtitles to videos helps both deaf people and language learners. Making websites usable with a screen reader also makes it easier to build automated tests. Disabilities are also not always permanent or complete; people with low vision can also benefit from screen readers even if not legally blind, for example.
Specifically for technology, you also need to understand the true life changing difference it can make on a disabled person’s life. My dad is blind, and thanks to screen readers on his computer and phone, he can read books, make Zoom calls for work, correspond with people via email and WhatsApp, and so much more. He’s in his 60s too, and technology has allowed him be an independent and productive member of society.
Most people will encounter some sort of disability during their lives. Your position doesn’t hold water.
Lumping in the obese with the blind to prove a point?
As a person with a disability, I’d rather not be treated as a problem that needs to be optimized away.
Wonderfully said.
The question is how to most effectively benefit everyone. Sometimes that means not investing a large marginal amount of money into one particular kind of disability.
Making an investment into serving the needs of those with disabilities serves everyone.
That's 656,400 people you are talking about not bothering to accommodate.
Most people >65 (i.e. the vast majority of deaf people) are not using Zoom.
No, you are wrong. The statement you make is true, but the implication is utterly false. You're selling this fiction that deafness is just an "old persons" thing.
According to the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (see
https://www.nidcd.nih.gov/health/statistics/quick-statistics...
)...
_Among adults aged 20-69, the overall annual prevalence of hearing loss dropped slightly from 16 percent (28.0 million) in the 1999-2004 period to 14 percent (27.7 million) in the 2011–2012 period._
At least one of Zoom's competitors has made a point of marketing to seniors isolated by COVID-19.
If you include HoH people, people who can't access audio at the moment, people who don't want to use audio at the moment (maybe have some music going on) etc. The number of people whose lives will have been improved through implementing usability for Deaf/deaf people will probably be a significant portion of the population.
I'm not HoH/deaf/Deaf but I know I'd definitely love the opportunity to have appropriate captions during calls because I sometimes struggle to pick up words when they're spoken quickly to me, especially on highly technical or complex subject matter as required for my job.