news

fan mail

it's always nice to receive a friendly email about some of the stuff i do. here's a particularly lovely missive that wound its way into my inbox this morning:

I came across your website when I clicked a link in the resource list from a presentation about web accessibility by John Croston: (http://www.jfciii.com/presentations/wasp/accessibility.html).

As a deaf user and a web specialist, I would like to express my concerns about the following post:
http://www.splintered.co.uk/news/110/

You are claiming to "rant about accessible and usable websites, best practices and the fact that common sense is not as common as one might hope."

If that's so, then why is the video provided with just a sign-language inset and no transcript? This it is a very bad example of "accessibility".

First, sign language is accessible only to a very small percent of local Deaf Germans who understand it: http://openandclosed.org/docs/ALA265/

Being based in the USA, I do not understand German Sign Language. Even if I were to live in Germany and to be fluent in German - I would not have found the sign language beneficial for myself either as being part of majority of deaf and hard of hearing people who have a good command of written language.

Second, a transcript would become not just accessible to those who cannot hear, but also usable to even more people who need text alternatives for other reasons such as being exposed to the other language than their own, having a restrictive hardware and being in a restrictive environment, etc. Transcripts are also easier to skim than audio.

Last, but not least, can't the video be translated into English, an "international" language spoken by 500 million–1.8 billion people and also spoken by many web professionals?

thanks for the patronising, aggressive tone, and the lecture on why a transcript would be a good idea. most of my other stuff on here is usually at least transcribed...sorry i didn't have the budget to commission a 2 hour transcript from a native german speaker, or that i didn't have the time to sit down and do it myself - considering this is mainly a hobby/sideline of mine, and i wasn't doing it on company time or money. why don't you take it up with the actual organisers of the conference? as for the suggestion to translate it into english, sure why not, as soon as i'm done with the chinese version perhaps? oh yeah, and happy holidays...

posted:

22/12/2009 at 10:09:11

tags:

accessibility arrogance