Why are closed captioning services so important? You may not know anyone with a significant hearing loss. Or you? According to the National Institute for Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD), approximately 15% of American adults (37.5 million people) over the age of 18 report some hearing difficulty. About two percent of adults ages 45 to 54 have a disabling hearing loss, rising to 8.5% in adults ages 55 to 64, 25% in adults ages 65 to 74, and 50% in US adults age 75 and older. Additionally, the NIDCD estimates that approximately 15% of Americans (26 million people) between the ages of 20 and 69 have high-frequency hearing loss due to noise exposure at work or during leisure activities.

As life expectancy continues to lengthen in the United States, more and more people diagnosed with substantial hearing loss can be expected to be affected by communication deficits for longer periods of time. So what are your communication options? Literate, to be sure, but more and more people are eschewing print media for television and the Internet to satisfy their information needs. Significant numbers of hearing-impaired people are likely to learn American Sign Language, but the availability of ASL is limited.

What about hearing aids? Some people will definitely improve their communication skills with hearing aids. But due to various reasons (eg, cost, stigma, physical discomfort), only 30% of people over age 70 who could benefit from hearing aids actually use them, according to the NIDCD, and the percentage drops even further for younger adults. . This equates to tens of millions of hearing-impaired American adults inadequately addressed by current communication modalities.

In addition, United States law now requires that closed captioning services be accessible for all programming produced by streaming video services and must be provided by broadcasters for all content distributed over the Internet if captioned when originally presented to the air (although in many cases, closed). caption services are not yet available for some programs). As more and more people turn to electronic media for their news and information needs, the importance of greater accessibility and transparency is clear.

But is it an inapplicable mandate?

In a BBC report last year, YouTube itself stated that its captioning services for the deaf and hard of hearing are “still not good enough”. According to the report, as of February 2015, YouTube had more than one billion unique users each month with more than six billion hours of content accessed and viewed each month. According to YouTube’s own figures, about a quarter of its content is subtitled, and of that, the majority is produced through automatic subtitles. A prominent vlogger and advocate for the deaf and hard of hearing claims in the report that the automatic captions generated by YouTube “make absolutely no sense.”

So how serious are we about accessibility? Three-quarters of YouTube’s media content is not accessible through closed captioning services, and of the 25% that is available, much of it lacks accuracy, often resulting in a transcript that bears little or no relation what is actually being talked about.

The most encouraging response to this unfortunate state of affairs has been through accessibility advocates encouraging volunteers to personally step in and subtitle the clips themselves. The BBC report states that shortly after a prominent video supporting better subtitling began to circulate, more than 2,000 subtitles were submitted in 70 different languages. While this is gratifying, it’s clearly just a drop in the bucket when videos posted to YouTube alone account for nearly an hour uploaded by every person on the planet each month. And while this work is done with virtuous intent, who is responsible for ensuring the accuracy of these subtitles? For universal accessibility for all to be taken seriously, the accuracy of the captions that accompany electronic media must also be taken seriously.

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