Disability Futures

Try this for me. Turn off your sound. Then, for the next few minutes, perhaps 5, I would like you to actually do the following rather than imagine it: go to YouTube and watch a video or two without sound. Choose at least one that has auto-generated captions. Go on, this post won’t be going anywhere.

[sips his coffee]
[sips more coffee][looks at coffee, shrugs, and drinks the entire cup in one go]
[notices you’re back]

Oh! Excuse me.

Well, how was that? I bet you missed out on a lot of information, unless you’re some kind of whiz lip-reader.

You got just a little taste of what a deaf person faces when wanting to watch a video online. Yet if you’re hearing, you can go back and watch that with the sound on, so it’s not exactly the same.

So many videos online, and so much is either not captioned or uses these auto-generated captions that rarely seem to work well. You know how people joke around about auto-correct on our phones? That’s what auto-generated captions often seem to be like. Here’s an example. I blurred the background because I don’t want to play a blame game here: