I am super proud to announce that https://zipcaptions.app is live! This is a free #accessibility tool to allow the easy addition of closed-captions to any live event! No ads, no signups, and no tracking, just speech to text formatted for a large screen. Hopefully this will encourage #teachers and #presenters to include the #deaf community more easily.
There is still a lot of work to be done, this is just the beginning. Please boost for visibility, as the budget for this project is zero dollars
TIL that the UK (just the little bit around England) has 3 sign languages. Which seems like it would really suck for such a small geographic area. I mean, I get it, and killing off 2 would be a terrible cultural loss like any spoken language, but support for #deaf folks is so bad to begin with that having it split 3 ways in such a small area. Just ... ugh.
"The first step in the project was lots of interviews with Deaf folks "to make sure we're designing a technology they actually want to use in a way that they actually want to use it".
It's not the first time people have tried to come up with a technology to help better connect hearing and Deaf people. But often those attempts have been driven by assumptions about what Deaf people want, says Adele Greedy-Vogel, another research assistant on the project who is a hearing child of Deaf adults.
"A lot of technology in this space … is so that hearing people can understand Deaf people," Adele says.
"There's always an emphasis on hearing people being able to understand and having access to all the information.
"We really need to change that framing because it's Deaf people that need the access, not hearing people.""
I did not know this was a thing. Corporations effectively disabling your phone or your washing machine to force you to buy a new one is bad enough. Doing the same with your ears is disgusting. Especially if you didn't advise that this would happen before installation, and marketed it as "forever". Yet another "How do these people sleep at night?" moment.
Today's indie author review: Casey Morales' I Hear You:
"What I loved about this book - besides the two great dogs and the two amazing humans - was what I learned about the things the deaf have to deal with... I highly recommend this book. Five stars."
Wikipedia's Women in Red project has categories every month and next month is Women and Disability which is one of my interest areas. Started an article about Charlotte Lamberton, a #deaf dancer from the 1930s and 1940s but finished it today. Torn between hitting publish or getting "credit" for it next month [I am aware this is ridiculous].
Hit publish.Turns out one of this month's WIR topic is Dance. Woohoo!