Deaf people settle for crumbs!

Time after time, deaf people – and other captioning viewers – settle for not enough captioning or lousy captioning. Or they file lawsuits and complaints against companies and, after all that trouble, they settle for exactly the same thing – not enough captioning or lousy captioning

While some deaf/hard-of-hearing organizations make a big show of demanding 100% captioning everywhere, in practice, some deaf people and deaf groups settle for much less.

• Human-rights complaints in Canada against three broadcasters – CBC Television and Newsworld; CTV; and Global – resulted in 100%-captioning requirements only for CBC and Newsworld. The other networks had to caption only programming, not commercials and promos. (And all of them could use any kind of captioning they wanted.)
• A human-rights complaint against movie theatres in Ontario resulted in a settlement. It doesn’t cover all theatres and it provides for some movies to be captioned using a device that isn’t on the market yet.
• A class-action lawsuit in the U.S. resulted in an agreement to caption some major-studio DVDs, but it had many exceptions and left out entire categories, like high-definition DVDs.
• A human-rights complaint in Australia resulted in forcing a few TV networks to caption all evening and all news programming. Nothing else had to be captioned, and nothing has to be captioned on channels that weren’t part of that process (like every channel that came into existence after the agreement was reached).

We think people with disabilities deserve full accessibility. We just wish that more people with disabilities agreed with us.