Meryl K. Evans talks about being Deaf and caption quality

Meryl tells us, among other things, that "If we notice the caption, it's a sign they're not good quality." Thanks to Tenon for sponsoring the transcript for this episode. Transcript Nic Hi, I'm Nic Steenhout. And you're listening to the accessibility rules soundbite, a series of short podcasts where disabled people explain their impairments, and what barriers they encounter on the web. First, I need to thank Tenon for sponsoring the transcript for this episode. Tenon provides accessibility as a service. They offer testing, training and tooling to help fix accessibility fast. Today, I'm talking with Meryl Evans. Hi, Meryl. How are you? Meryl I'm doing great. Thank you, Nic, How about yourself? Nic I'm doing fantastic. And I'm so glad to finally get you on the show. We've been speaking for two years now. And it's time! Meryl Yeah, thank you for having me. Nic So let's jump right in it. What is your disability or your impairment? Meryl Well, if the audience hasn't figured out by now, my accent doesn't exactly hail from anywhere. So I was born profoundly deaf. And as you know, deaf and hard of hearing people are different. My deaf background is that took lots and lots of speech therapy, to learn how to speak and read lips. I am not fluent in American Sign Language, that's not a good thing or a bad thing. It's not better or worse. It just is. Anyway, being born Deaf also makes me more susceptible to vertigo. Nic Okay. All right. So vertigo, is all happening in the inner ear. And that's tied to your deafness. That's kind of a thing I think most people would not be aware of. Meryl I wasn't even aware about until I had my cochlear implant surgery. It left me with a severe case of vertigo, the worse of my whole life. And I had it for weeks. I couldn't get out of bed. I could barely sit up to drink. So after that happened, they referred me to vestibular specialist. And that's when I learned that being born deaf probably messed up something inside the inner ear as you said. That makes me more susceptible to vertigo. And I did a little research not long ago because I was curious if that's a common for deaf people in general, a lot. And it's pretty common. It depends on the hearing loss and all that. But it's really pretty common. Nic Fascinating. Let's circle back to web, and what would be the greatest barrier you experienced on the web? Around your deafness? Meryl Let me ask your audience would you publish a blog without editing? Well, then why do so many publish their captions without editing? Thus the greatest barrier I experience on the web is the lack of high quality captioned videos. But let’s dig deeper. Either videos have no caption or rely 100% on automatic captions. Or autocraptions as I call them. They're a great starting point. The next step is to edit them for accuracy and timing. The littlest improvement makes a huge difference in preventing cognitive overload. What do I mean by that? It means keeping a line no more than 32 characters per line. It means having only one or two lines. It means clearly identifying sound and speaker. It means including song titles and lyrics. It means not using italics or all uppercase. To top it all off, some videos contain no player controls and starts playing automatically. Even as a profoundly deaf person, it bugs me when the video plays unexpectedly and the sound blasts my head off. Nic Ha! Meryl And there was no volume control or even a rewind one or a fast forward. Nic Yeah. What would you say is the acceptable level of accuracy? Because we often see people refer to automated captions being 80 or 85% accurate and we often have People say well, even when you have manually transcripted content or manually captioned content, you can't get better than 95 or 96%. If you had to, say the percentage of acceptable accuracy, what would you say that would be? Meryl It would have to be in the high 90's. It'