Bridging the Gap Between the Hearing & Deaf Worlds
After several years hiatus, I have gone back to the cinema to watch the new Star Wars movie, which also happens to be the first time ever I watched a movie with captions.
This post is not a review of the movie nor will there be any spoilers. It’s just a personal story of how it went for me and what could be done to make the cinema experience even more accessible for more people.
Click here to learn more about my first captioned cinema experience here
You are probably aware of the words ‘captions’ and ‘subtitles’ and at first glance, they may appear to be identical.
But they’re not.
So what are the differences between the captions and subtitles? And did you even know that there are differences?
You might find it hard to believe that auto-captions are bad for SEO. But if you think about it’s low-quality content; something which YouTube and Google does not like. Yet, from my own experience and research, many people still resort to using auto-captions (which is often labelled as ‘craption’) for their YouTube videos. We take […]
Welcome to The Hear Me Out! [CC] Podcast, an audio show (with transcripts included) where we listen to stories from fascinating individuals in and around the d/Deaf community and from your host, yours truly, Ahmed Khalifa.
In this episode, I got chatting with Henry Warren who is running a campaign called ‘Turn on the Subtitles’ where he is encouraging broadcasters and technology platforms to turn on the subtitles as research has shown that it can help improve children’s literacy rate.
Listen to podcast or read transcript of interview with Henry Warren
After recently experiencing of a listening to a podcast by a well-known person, and from years of similar experiences from a number of podcasts and videos, it’s time to call it out if you are not providing transcripts or captions to your content.
Since I have less patience about bad quality content and experience, this is an opportunity for me to call it out on people who don’t make their content accessible. But it’s not just about making it accessible because you feel like “you have to”, but you will get a lot of benefits out of it too.
Listen to the podcast or read the transcript of episode 20 here
In episode 13, amidst the hype around the Avengers: Endgame movie, I open up with personal story about how The Avengers has played a part in triggering my emotions and unleashed my deaf advocacy.
Even though everyone is able to enjoy “the best movie ever”, I cannot experience the same joy, which was difficult to accept. But it did not mean that I just wanted to sit around and accept it.
During my day job, I help to grow small business’ WordPress website and I talk about that on my other website.
But like many people, I have had my fair share of barriers when it comes to accessibility. I wanted to share a story about my recent one.
Read more about how I felt shot down because of my accessibility needs
There is a very good chance that you’ve seen it on many differences places.
Online videos, films, TV programmes, video games…captions are gradually becoming a norm and many of us are expecting to have the option to check whether it’s available and to switch it on (whether it’s available or not is another debate).
But one thing that many of us have noticed is that there are 2 types of captions: open and closed captions.
However, it’s not very clear on what are the differences between the two and when to use them respectively.
In episode 7podcast, I talk about the release of the video game Spyro Reignited Trilogy not having subtitles during the cut-scenes.
And there was also a surprising statement by the games developer and publisher on their decisions not to add it.
Read or listen to the story about Spyro video and lack of subtitles
