Deafness and the User Experience

Sunday 5th April 2009

A List Apart published an insightful article last year by Lisa Herrod which focusses on Deafness and the User Experience; a subject that all accessible web designers should be aware of. The main thrust of the article is that simply adding audio captioning to video is not enough:

we need to stop thinking of deafness as simply the inverse of hearing - we need to understand deafness from both a cultural and linguistic perspective.

On so many levels, from understanding deafness culturally and linguistically to semantics (like the difference between captioning and subtitling - captioning is the transcription of speech and important sound effects while subtitling is a written translation of dialogue) to technical appreciation, like how a phrase or passage of text is best transcribed (or translated) to understanding how a web site should be designed and built, it's clear that there's no quick-win solution that will ensure a website is accessible and usable for Deaf users; it's the combination of all these points.

Further reading:

• Captioning Sucks
• Open & Closed Project
• Web captioning overview
• Joe Clark - the king of closed captions

Deafness, User Experience, web accessibility, deaf, captioning, caption,

posted by Blair Millen in the category: accessibility