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Mentor

Communication Access needed on Zoom. Please sign petition

Posted by Julie, Volunteer Mentor @julieo4, Dec 8, 2020

Please read the post from hard of Hearing Blogger, Shari Eberts

NPR Highlights Need for Captions on Zoom for People with Hearing Loss

The author writes, “You would never build a building, include ramps but then ask people in wheelchairs to pay to use them. The same holds for people with hearing loss. Captions are our ramps. Why should we have to pay to use the feature we require for equal access?”

If you agree, please sign and share the petition to make Zoom have captions for those of us who are Deaf or hard of hearing:

Provide Free Captions for People with Hearing Loss on Video Conferencing Platforms

https://www.change.org/p/zoom-provide-free-captions-for-people-with-hearing-loss-on-video-conferencing-platforms

Interested in more discussions like this? Go to the Hearing Loss Support Group.

Mentor
Julie, Volunteer Mentor | @julieo4 | Dec 21, 2020
In reply to @tonyinmi "@ken82 Yes, Zoom has had captioning for some time but there was always a cost. We..." + (show)
@tonyinmi

@ken82 Yes, Zoom has had captioning for some time but there was always a cost. We always pay for our CART writer to provide live captions instead of relying on the automatic captions. Auto captions do not always do a good enough job, especially when you have speaker that does not have clear speech. This is highly probable with people that were born with hearing loss. Zoom has a lot of training videos and some are live. I've participated in several Zoom trainings that used the pre-released version of automatic captions and they were very good, especially since it seemed that English may not have been the speakers first language.
Tony in Michigan

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Tony, we tried the Zoom captions for our HLAA chapter's holiday social. They worked well. For our regular meetings, we hire a CART provider whether meetings are online or in person. It costs around $250 per meeting to have CART. Fortunately, our state office for D/HH allots some funds for us to draw from. We will continue to use CART as long as we can afford it. This is the only way to go with regular in person meetings. Virtual meetings become a choice. We have the Zoom Pro program, so the captions are included now. While there are a few errors here and there, for the most part if people are paying attention, it's pretty easy to 'fix' the incorrect word(s) because they are aware of context. You are correct some deaf speech or foreign accents will distort the speech to text captioning. A group using the speech to text feature would have to make decisions based on the situation and the funds available. Speech to text is something we early HLAAers often discussed and dreamed about 25 year ago. It was like science fiction. Amazing how technology has changed since then.

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