Hearing Loss in America, How Serious Are We About Accessibility?
Why are caption services so important? Perhaps you don’t know anyone with a significant hearing impairment. Or do you do it? According to the National Institute for Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD), approximately 15% of American adults (37.5 million people) age 18 and older report having some hearing impairment. About two percent of adults ages 45-54 have a disabling hearing loss, increasing to 8.5% for adults 55-64, 25% for adults 65-74, and 50% for American adults 75 years or 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 exposure to noise at work or during leisure activities.
As life expectancy continues to increase 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? Reading and writing, to be sure, but more and more people are avoiding print, television and the Internet to satisfy their information needs. It is very likely that a significant number of people with hearing difficulties learn American Sign Language, but ASL has limited availability.
What about hearing aids? Some people will definitely improve their communication skills with hearing aids. But for various reasons (e.g., cost, stigma, physical discomfort), only 30% of people over 70 who could benefit from hearing aids actually use them, according to the NIDCD, and the percentage drops even further for hearing aids. younger adults. This equates to tens of millions of American adults with hearing impairments that are inadequately addressed by current communication modalities.
Additionally, United States law now requires closed captioning services to be accessible to all programming produced by video streaming services and must be provided by broadcasters for all content distributed over the Internet if captioned when were originally aired on the air (although in many cases, closed captioning services are not yet available for some shows). As more and more people look to electronic media for their news and information needs, the importance of greater accessibility and transparency becomes clear.
But is it an unenforceable mandate?
In a BBC report last year, YouTube itself stated that its closed captioning services for the deaf and hard of hearing are “not good enough yet.” According to the report, in 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 captioned, and of that, most is produced through automatic captions. A prominent vlogger and advocate for the deaf and hard of hearing asserts in the report that the automatic captions generated by YouTube “don’t make any sense.”
So how serious are we about accessibility? Three-quarters of YouTube’s media content is not accessible at all through captioning services, and of the 25% that are available, a large amount lacks precision, and often features a transcript that has little or no relative to what is actually being talked about.
The most encouraging response to this sorry state of affairs has been through accessibility advocates encouraging volunteers to personally step in and caption the clips. The BBC report claims that shortly after a featured video supporting better subtitling began circulating, more than 2,000 subtitles were sent in 70 different languages. While this is rewarding, it is clearly just a drop in the bucket when videos posted to YouTube only account for nearly an hour uploaded for 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 captions? For universal accessibility for all to be taken seriously, the accuracy of captions accompanying electronic media must also be taken seriously.