Meryl tells us, among other things, that “If we notice the caption, it’s a sign they’re not good quality.”
Thanks to Tenon for sponsoring the transcript for this episode.
Transcript
Nic
Hi, I’m Nic Steenhout. And you’re listening to the accessibility rules soundbite, a series of short podcasts where disabled people explain their impairments, and what barriers they encounter on the web. First, I need to thank Tenon for sponsoring the transcript for this episode. Tenon provides accessibility as a service. They offer testing, training and tooling to help fix accessibility fast. Today, I’m talking with Meryl Evans. Hi, Meryl. How are you?
Meryl
I’m doing great. Thank you, Nic, How about yourself?
Nic
I’m doing fantastic. And I’m so glad to finally get you on the show. We’ve been speaking for two years now. And it’s time!
Meryl
Yeah, thank you for having me.
Nic
So let’s jump right in it. What is your disability or your impairment?
Meryl
Well, if the audience hasn’t figured out by now, my accent doesn’t exactly hail from anywhere. So I was born profoundly deaf. And as you know, deaf and hard of hearing people are different. My deaf background is that took lots and lots of speech therapy, to learn how to speak and read lips. I am not fluent in American Sign Language, that’s not a good thing or a bad thing. It’s not better or worse. It just is. Anyway, being born Deaf also makes me more susceptible to vertigo.
Nic
Okay. All right. So vertigo, is all happening in the inner ear. And that’s tied to your deafness. That’s kind of a thing I think most people would not be aware of.
Meryl
I wasn’t even aware about until I had my cochlear implant surgery. It left me with a severe case of vertigo, the worse of my whole life. And I had it for weeks. I couldn’t get out of bed. I could barely sit up to drink. So after that happened, they referred me to vestibular specialist. And that’s when I learned that being born deaf probably messed up something inside the inner ear as you said. That makes me more susceptible to vertigo. And I did a little research not long ago because I was curious if that’s a common for deaf people in general, a lot. And it’s pretty common. It depends on the hearing loss and all that. But it’s really pretty common.
Nic
Fascinating. Let’s circle back to web, and what would be the greatest barrier you experienced on the web? Around your deafness?
Meryl
Let me ask your audience would you publish a blog without editing? Well, then why do so many publish their captions without editing? Thus the greatest barrier I experience on the web is the lack of high quality captioned videos. But let’s dig deeper. Either videos have no caption or rely 100% on automatic captions. Or autocraptions as I call them. They’re a great starting point. The next step is to edit them for accuracy and timing. The littlest improvement makes a huge difference in preventing cognitive overload. What do I mean by that? It means keeping a line no more than 32 characters per line. It means having only one or two lines. It means clearly identifying sound and speaker. It means including song titles and lyrics. It means not using italics or all uppercase. To top it all off, some videos contain no player controls and starts playing automatically. Even as a profoundly deaf person, it bugs me when the video plays unexpectedly and the sound blasts my head off.
Nic
Ha!
Meryl
And there was no volume control or even a rewind one or a fast forward.
Nic
Yeah. What would you say is the acceptable level of accuracy? Because we often see people refer to automated captions being 80 or 85% accurate and we often have People say well, even when you have manually transcripted content or manually captioned content, you can’t get better than 95 or 96%. If you had to, say the percentage of acceptable accuracy, what would you say that would be?
Meryl
It would have to be in the high 90’s. It’s amazing how one word or one letter that’s incorrect can confuse you on the whole line. Now, it may be obvious to people, I can figure out this one. But don’t forget the caption are always moving. They don’t stop. You don’t have time to fill in the wrong words and wrong lines, one letter. I mean, even one letter can throw you off. So, it means the high 80’s, 85, 90 is definitely not acceptable. It would be a very bad viewing experience.
Nic
It’s funny what you’re saying reminds me of when I was learning English, English is my fourth language. And early on, it often happened that by the time I had understood the first sentence, the first speaker was already on the fifth or sixth sentence. And that’s where you’re talking about cognitive overload is there’s so much to take in that you just can’t keep going.
Meryl
Exactly. You get it. Thats exactly what’s happening, and people just don’t realize, even though a lot of people who use captions aren’t deaf they have to fall back, they have their hearing to fall back on. And they don’t depend on captioning like I do. I use captions every day, for years for decades, actually. And so, the slightest things can really affect the experience?
Nic
What message would you have for designers or developers around accessibility?
Meryl
It’s important to give viewers as much control as possible. And this includes motion. Don’t autoplay anything that moves including sliders, background video on landing pages, and animated GIFs. It’s entirely possible to let the viewer be in control. Twitter has a reduced motion and autoplay settings. So, animated GIFs only play when I push play and they stop when I tap again.
Nic
Yeah
Meryl
Please stop using parallax. There’s a reason why accessibility settings include reduce motion as an option. You’d be surprised how many people have vertigo, migraines and other vestibular disorders. One study found 70% of deaf and hard of hearing children with sensorineural hearing loss have a vestibular disorder. That’s why it’s important for people not to walk and talk on video calls. It is dizzying especially for lip readers. Additionally, vestibular disorders affect more than those who are deaf and hard of hearing.
Nic
Yeah.
Meryl
The Vestibular Disorder Association says more than 35% of U.S. adults aged 40 and older, experience a vestibular dysfunction at some point in their lives. It’s always better user experience to let viewers have control over any motion.
Nic
Hmm
Meryl
Designers and developers may turn off the sound to test the caption. But the results won’t be as good as having someone who depends on the captions to test it.
Nic
Yeah.
Meryl
If you depend on captions every day, you’ve become accustomed to what works and what doesn’t work. Someone turning off the sound to test them isn’t going to see these problems. If we notice the caption, it’s a sign they’re not good quality. Just like editing is part of the publishing process. Please make accessibility part of your entire process.
Nic
Fantastic. Meryl, thank you so much for your insight, and we’ll see you on the web sometime.
Meryl
Thank you.
Nic
Thank you