web accessibility issues for the deaf and hard of hearing
This is the transcript of the speech from the video above.
As we've observed elsewhere, the web is a largely visual medium: photographs, animations, fancy graphics are everywhere. Recently, thanks to the success of sites like YouTube, there's been a proliferation of online videos as well. And this highlights another issue for accessibility: that of catering for deaf users who of course cannot hear sounds. This is of particular importance where a video contains essential information.
It's not difficult to imagine how frustrating this experience can be for deaf users, but let's demonstrate anyway...
I'm now continuing to talk animatedly, but you can't hear what I'm saying. It so happens that I'm saying things that I'm replicating elsewhere on the page, but many companies choose to use this talking head format to convey information that they don't then replicate elsewhere.
For reasons we've discussed elsewhere - for moral reasons, for legal reasons and for business reasons - this is a mistake. For instance, it's not simply your deaf users that can't hear your sounds: anyone surfing on a train or in a library or at work is likely to have the sound turned down.
Fortunately, there are simple solutions to this problem. The most obvious of which is to do subtitling which we do here - and Dreamberry do provide subtitling services - however, they can be costly because they're so time consuming.
A simpler and perfectly valid alternative is to use a full text transcript as we do down here. This doesn't even need to be on the same page - it's perfectly valid to provide a link to the transcript for your deaf users.
And that is a very simple solution to accessibility for the deaf on the internet.
There is another issue. For some deaf people, English is not their first language - sign language is. However, unless you're making a site catering exclusively to the deaf, then the practical issues and expense involved in creating a parallel sign language version are likely to mean they fall outside the scope of "reasonable adjustment".