My blogger friend Dr. Tom Goyne has several interesting posts with links to videos that Phonak, Widex, Oticon and other major hearing-aid companies are putting on the web. Great, but….Why aren’t any of the hearing-aid manufacturers’ videos captioned?!??!
Some of the videos are really slick productions. Like Tom, I applaud their efforts to reach out directly to consumers to erase the old stigma of hearing aids and educate people about the new technologies that make hearing aids so much better than they used to be. (They are the next step in the consumer marketing trend kicked into high gear last year by Phonak, which blitzed the fashion world with its high-glam Audeo ads.) How ironic, and what a disappointment, then, to find that none of the videos are captioned. I really would love to see what that earnest Widex customer has to say in her testimonial.
Granted, a number of the videos don’t have any speaking parts or voiceovers, only some techno or new-age music with a lot of imagery and simple printed content. But if you depend on captioning as I do, it’s always nice to be notified even when nothing is being said (as when the captions say “…ominous music” with musical note signs). I think hard-of-hearing viewers should be much more vocal demanding captioning not just on TV and on DVDs, but on the web as well.
Smaller manufacturers still can be forgiven for not captioning their videos, because it’s still a little difficult and expensive to integrate captioning with your homemade YouTube videos. But when you’re spending tens of thousands of dollars on a slickly produced video ad, you can’t be forgiven for not bothering to have the ad agency put captions on the video. And soon, there will be no excuse whatsoever. Tayler Mayer, who runs the Deaf Read aggregator site, has a great blog post on how Google now lets you search for captioned videos on YouTube and anywhere else on the web, specifying “search only closed captioned videos.” He also gives a link to a download on do-it-yourself captions for your homemade videos. (Bragging note: my multimedia guru, Dave Counts, designed my Aquarius Advisers website three years ago with captioned videos. He was among the first to figure out how to caption flash videos for the web.) Isn’t it time the hearing-aid manufacturers got on the captioning bandwagon?
