Hearing Loss in America, How Serious Are We About Accessibility?

Why is closed captioning service important? Maybe you don't know someone with serious hearing impairments. Or you? According to the Institute for Deafness and Other Communication Disorders [NIDCD], about 15% of American adults over the age of 18 [37.5 million] report hearing loss. Approximately 2% of adults aged 45 to 54 suffer from hearing impairment, increasing to 8.5% for adults aged 55 to 64, 25% for adults aged 65 to 74, and 50% for American adults over 75 doing. In addition, NIDCD estimates that approximately 15% [26 million] of Americans between the ages of 20 and 69 are exposed to noise during work and leisure activities, resulting in high frequency hearing loss.

As life expectancy continues to increase in the United States, it is expected that more people diagnosed with significant hearing loss will affect more and more people over a long period of time. So what are their communication options? Sure, you can read and write, but more and more people are avoiding print media for television and the Internet to meet their information needs. While a significant number of people with hearing impairments are very likely to learn American sign language, the availability of ASL is limited.

How about a hearing aid? Certainly, some people improve their communication skills with hearing aids. However, according to NIDCD, only 30% of people over the age of 70 who may actually benefit from hearing aids are used for various reasons [cost, stigma, physical discomfort, etc.] The percentage of adults is even lower. This is equivalent to tens of millions of American adults with hearing impairment who are poorly addressed by current methods of communication.

In addition, U.S. law provides access to closed captioning services for all programs created by streaming video services, and for all content delivered over the Internet if captioned first on air. It must be provided by the broadcaster [in many cases the captioning service is not yet available for some closed programs]. When more and more people are looking for electronic media for news and information needs, the importance of increasing accessibility and transparency is obvious.

But is it an unforced instruction?

In a BBC report last year, YouTube itself said that closed captioning services for hearing-impaired people were “not enough”. According to the report, as of February 2015, YouTube has over 1 billion unique users each month, and over 6 billion hours of content is accessed and displayed every month. According to YouTube statistics, about a quarter of the content is closed captioning, most of which is created by automatic captioning. A prominent blogger and advocate for deaf and hard-of-hearing people that the automatic captions generated by YouTube are “no meaning at all”.

So how serious are we about accessibility? Three-quarters of YouTube's media content is completely inaccessible via closed captioning services, and the vast amount of 25% available is inaccurate and actually spoken.

The most encouraging response to this unfortunate event comes from accessibility advocates who encourage volunteers to intervene personally and place caption clips in themselves. The BBC report states that more than 2000 captions were submitted in more than 70 languages ​​shortly after prominent videos supporting better closed captions began to circulate. This is pleasing, but obviously, if a video posted on YouTube is uploaded to each person on Earth every month for nearly an hour, it is only a moment. And this work is done in good faith, but who is responsible for ensuring the accuracy of these captions? To seriously consider universal accessibility for everyone, you must also take the accuracy of captions associated with electronic media seriously.