Tuesday, November 25, 2008

Captioning and DBC

I'm a strong supporter of captioning of web video and I'm also a strong supporter of the cause of the Deaf Bilingual Coalition(DBC). The more I think about these causes, I realized how captioning can help the cause of DBC. I see often times where we are deprived of captioning of web video that entirely in the spoken language and we should continue to advocate for the rights to appreciate them. Take for instance a post by a friend of mine who happened to be Deaf and also know the words to one of John Denver's song by heart. She took upon herself to caption the song. Now this brings joy to my heart.
Earlier I stated captioning can help the cause of DBC. We are so bent sometimes on ensuring our rights to captioning but sometimes we forget the rights of Deaf children of hearing parents. Why don't we also advocate for the rights to literacy of Deaf children by exposing them to American Sign Language(ASL). One way we can do such is to advocate for the captioning of ASL video by saying all video of ASL to also be caption. I often times enjoy watching an ASL VLOG and thought this is an excellent story that the greater public should also know about, yet they will be deprived of it since it is not captioned. If we want to encourage hearing parent to learn ASL so they can also pass them on to their Deaf children, then we should demand that ASL video also be captioned for the hearing people. It should be a two way street for the greater needs of everyone.