cielo24 Media TechTalk Podcast, Episode 003

Title: Discrimination and Normalized Ableism: The Impact of Removing Crowdsourced Closed Captions on Video

Date: November 18, 2020

>> Hello and welcome. You're listening to Media TechTalk, an ongoing conversation about innovation, resilience and what's ahead in media technology. I'm Nicole Flynn, your host. I'm a marketing executive in the technology space. Each week, we will be exploring the latest trends around how leaders adapt in a disruptive world and prepare for a brighter tomorrow.

We're going to speak to the innovators who are re-imagining technology in new ways. Thank you for joining us. Hi there, and I'm Nicole Flynn and this is cielo24 Media TechTalk. And we are here today with Emily Fleming, love the name. Emily is a news editor at the Quinnipiac Chronicle but she's also a journalism student at Quinnipiac.

Emily, thank you for joining us.
>> Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here.
>> Super excited and I'm about to turn the mic over to you. But before I do that, I just wanna say what drew me into having you speak with us today. I think it's super important to highlight certain topics, a company like ours.

And one that doesn't get enough attention is the topic and the discussion and that the dialogue and definitions around disabilities. And I ran into an article of yours, one of your many articles, very impressive resume you already have.
>> Thank you.
>> And the title of the article, and forgive me, I'm gonna look at my notes, is Discrimination Against People with Disabilities.

Subtitle is Removing Crowdsourced Closed Captioning on YouTube Exemplifies Normalized Ableism. That is a mouthful. But more than anything, the article itself is just, it's packed and so I don't wanna take your message from you. I think that you need to speak on this and I'm just so grateful for what you share.

So with that, I'll let you kind of start, maybe talk a little bit about your background and also your role as an editor, cuz I think that's important also. And then we'll go from there.
>> All right, awesome, sounds good. So just to start off, I was born profoundly deaf in both ears, which means I can hear absolutely nothing without my cochlear implants.

I received my cochlear implants in both ears, one when I was three and one when I was five. It looks a little bit different nowadays where you can get say, timed early intervention services are a little bit more streamlined, that kind of thing. Right, when I was born my parents wanted to do early intervention services right away.

So starting at six months old, they were all about trying to get me to be stimulated because that's a big issue when you're younger. So that was very important to my parents. So that's kind of how I ended up where I am today, because my parents were very big on making sure that I was able to function in everyday society.

And I appreciated that sentiment but as I got older, I kind of realized that I had to adapt to society. And not necessarily a bad thing, being adaptable is important. But I always found it kind of strange that I was the only one who kind of had to struggle.

My parents are both hearing and so is my brother. Nobody in my family, even extended family, is deaf. So that was kind of my parents' decision in making sure that I was able to hear was so that I could communicate with them. And that's totally valid and a lot of people have different schools of thought about being born deaf versus choosing to hear and that kind of thing.

I'm very happy that I can hear. I love hearing. I love being able to participate in society, the hearing world. But something that I do think is interesting is that people who maybe don't pick up your pencil, get hearing aids, that kind of thing, they're kind of looked down upon, well, we can't communicate with you, that kind of thing.

And it's like, well, why is there such a big divide? Why can't we just make it easier for everybody to communicate no matter what their decision is? I think, we talk about this all the time, communication is so important and that starts at the base level of speaking and hearing and listening.

So If you remove that, of course, people are going to feel isolated. And I think things like YouTube removing crowdsourced captions, and that kind of thing is an example that isolation and that feeling of, well, you're different. You're, we can't communicate with you. Well, you should have here.

I've heard that before. I've heard people say they should have cochlear implants. One, it's not that simple, and two, even if it was maybe they just don't want to, maybe they're fine with using only ASL and communicating that way. So yeah, so that's kind of what sparked in me, was just like me realizing that even though I'm so happy that I can hear and then I could speak really well and that kind of thing.

I also think is completely valid, if one of my deaf friends was like, I never wanna hear, I'm fine on using ASL. So, that's kind of where I kind of started thinking about things more critically. And then I remember one time I was in high school, and I had no IEP Individualized Education Plan, which is like, right.

So I remember, I think in ninth grade. Once I took this certain test with my speech and hearing, and I got over an 80 on my hearing test with my cochlear implants, they told me that I was no longer considered disabled and I was very confused by that.

And I had to move down to the 504 plan and I remember I didn't understand why I was no longer considered disabled when nothing really happened in my life that was changed, but nothing changed, right?
>> It's very confusing.
>> I was very confused. But I remember my mom even was like, well, why isn't she disabled anymore?

Nothing's different. Well, she scored over an 80 on her hearing test. My mom was like, as a result of hard work and just hearing, the longer you have cochlear implants, the better your hearing gets. So my parents were like, well, that's just a result of having cochlear implants.

Your brain has just sort of adapted to it. And they were like, well, now that she can hear 80% of what we can hear, then she's not disabled. And I was like-
>> Not that 20% but you can't hear, I mean.
>> Yeah, it's crazy.
>> Which is number one, and number two, it's not even proven that the 80% I'm hearing is the same 80% that a normal hearing person is hearing.


>> Interesting, yeah.
>> I was like there's a couple of things wrong with that. So I remember I was like, well, what does this mean for me, they literally read me the definition of disabled, which was that it has to be, whatever ailment you have, physical or otherwise, has to impact a certain daily activity, like daily activity.

And I was like, well, it does, and they were like yeah, but you can, they asked me, can you communicate with everyone, I was like yeah. They were like, can you hear everyone? I was like, pretty much, and they're like, the you're not disabled, and I was like, but if I take off my cochlear implant, I can't hear anything.

If it dies, my battery dies and I'm at school. I forgot my batteries that day. So am I just in and out of being disabled? And I found it very strange that the label of disabled depended upon how other people are interacting with me, not the experiences I have.

It's the experiences other people are having with me. And that just confused me so much because they didn't care if I said, well, yeah, it seems like I can hear really well, that's just because I'm not stopping to repeat themselves anytime I miss something.
>> So right before you go on, you did write in your article that the definition of disabled by the CDC as defined is that it relies upon people's interactions with The disabled person, so it's the fact other people are, how they're experiencing you?


>> Correct.
>> In the world, which is mind blowing. I mean, that's why your article grabbed me, I was like, what do you need? I would love to hear from you, what that feels like? And the community at large because I imagine from looking at your body of work.

That you're pretty well versed on this and you can kind of share with us what that feels like.
>> Yeah, well, I think when I kind of had this realisation I was just pretty frustrated. I was like, as a person who, thankfully, and I'm a privileged person that I can hear most of the time.

I cannot imagine someone who is completely deaf all the time going about their day in a hearing world. And what they experience doesn't matter because all that matters is how a hearing person or an able bodied person is interacting with them. So, they could say, they could go out.

Let's pretend a person completely deaf only uses ASL. They went to a store. They go grocery shopping, the checkout, and the cashier has no trouble communicating with them because they don't really ask them too many questions, they just say, your total's 567, they see it on the thing, the cashier has no idea that the person they leave.

The deaf person maybe had a different experience where they're going on like, my gosh, I feel so confused, what if someone's talking to me and I don't know. What if they're saying, so this has happened to me too where my ears die, right? My gosh, are they talking to me, am I missing something, what if the fire alarm goes off and I can't hear it, everyone runs out.

All these thoughts, all these feelings. It's kind of anxiousness of well, am I missing something, is something going on? That doesn't matter though because the cashier had no problem interacting with them. So by definition, the disabled person's day was not impacted, because they got along just fine, nothing happened, doesn't matter.

Even though internally they could be struggling and just like dealing with, my gosh, I'm nervous, what's going on?
>> Of course, of course.
>> I think that's kind of the distinction that needs to be made, because some at first glance it might seem like well, yeah, interaction, whatever, no, because what I'm experiencing is different than what you're experiencing.

But your opinion only matters even though you're able bodied. And that just seems kind of wrong to me. Somebody shift the narrative to be about the disabled person's experiences. And just not how I'm affecting other people's lives. Am I a burden? Am I a problem? That shouldn't be the rhetoric about it.


>> No, it's profound what you're saying. And at the same time it's so logical and simple. But it's hard to believe we're this far along in our understanding of disabled rights in our country and around the world. And we're still having this dialogue. And I think that anyone listening to this conversation and that you're a student on top of it, you're in a learning environment where all your senses are really important.

You're right. I had a deaf intern for a long time who preferred to read lips, he did not want to hear. It was uncomfortable for him to hear. So he preferred to read lips. And I wasn't sure if that's how this discussion was going to go today. So I turned on my video initially, as you know.


>> I appreciate that, thank you.
>> Yeah, so I want to say this because I think that from my perspective as a non disabled person, I think that there's a certain level of discomfort for the non disabled world dealing with the disabled world. A lot of that is what's in vogue and what's not as terminology, disabled, deaf, hard of hearing.

I mean, you got people saying one word's the right word, the other, and it's unfair. And yeah, I think that has impeded our progress where I think maybe the terminology is not as important as showing up to the plate and making sure that all people are counted when we're in any environment.

And I know this dialog given what CLO 24 does, media tech talk. We do focus on captions and transcripts as one of our outputs of video intelligence. And it's interesting, and another reason why this article came up that you wrote, which is lovely, and I will be linking to it, and we actually posted it on our blog as a guest blog this week.

Is because YouTube, there's just this little unknown thing that people don't realize that you definitely realize, that YouTube removed crowdsourced closed captioning, so I know what a whammy that is for you. But I'm willing to bet most people out there don't, and I would love to get your perspective as a deaf fully counted human.

Tell us in your words and from your community, what does this mean to you?
>> Yeah, so when I heard this news I was shocked. I thought it was fake actually. I didn't think that in 2020, I'd be hearing that something that was progressive was being taken away for the disabled community.

So I was like, hm, I looked into it and YouTube said, well, it's because we're not really used that much. And it was like it was something like it's only on 1 out of 20 videos or something like that. That kind of thing. And I was just thinking about it and I was like, well, not everybody needs to use closed captioning.

So I think it was a little bit of a miscalculation there, that they thought, well, since it's not used on 80% of the videos, well, we're gonna get rid of it, it's like well, are 80% of people really needing to use closed captioning? No, of course not. So I was like, what?

And then, so their reasoning right away to me was just ridiculous, they clearly didn't think it through. And then something else to point out is that the crowd sourced captioning most of the time is the most reliable form of captioning on the YouTube video. If the creator doesn't caption your videos, then second in command is the crowd sourced captions, which someone who can hear really well or whatever can insert their own captions and put it on the video, and then the computer doesn't have to do anything.

I think they just have to accept it. And then someone like me can turn it on. And I can even see very clearly that it says so this person put the captions on there. Every time I see that I'm like, what a blessing, thank you. Because as much as I can hear really well, it is difficult to hear videos and I'm just that kind of thing, a speaker is, I hear the microphones and anyone knows that a microphone next to the speaker isn't great sound quality, right?

So that's kind of why I always use closed captioning despite the fact that I can hear very well in my everyday interactions. So anytime the captions aren't great on YouTube, I was always just kind of frustrated, I would half the time just not watch the video. Because I would know going into it that the automatic captioning that YouTube has, which is, that's like Google's automatic captioning service is only about 60% of 66% accurate.

It's like two out of every three words, right? But that's just not enough. And I've done a lot of research on this and I believe it's the FCC, no, FTC-
>> I don't know.
>> FTC. Yeah, okay.
>> They have the guidelines written down where on TV, captions have to be-


>> Yes.
>> 79% accurate.
>> Mm-hm.
>> So it was just baffling to me too that the law hasn't quite caught up to modern day society, and done anything about mandating that captions need to be accurate online when nowadays everything's online.
>> Yep, and it's changing, it's just a little bit slower than we'd all like.

I mean, I could give you so many statistics about the benefit of captions to the hearing audience.
>> Exactly, but
>> Yeah, so definitely along with this podcast, I'm going to link some articles education of the benefits of captioning because there are so many benefits. I mean, just social video, for instance is muted.

So without captions is not going to grab someone's attention. But a lot of users I think it's somewhere like
>> 40% of users that are watching a video turn on the captions, just because because learning modalities are different for everyone. And I think that's also really important that also applies to the disabled communities.

They have as many learning preferences as the non disabled community. So there's so many benefits here and so many levels I I have to say I cannot thank you enough for having this discussion with us today. I don't want to end though without last thoughts from you, at least for now because you have a huge body of work and I would love for you to come back on later and maybe do a podcast with our other students that we work with.

But I'd love if you could leave us with thoughts about you know what we can do better now because we know that the law is slow to catch up what we can do better now as a community to create fewer barriers to entry for those that have disabilities.

We all know now, captioning is really inexpensive. For that standard captioning that you're talking about, it's less than $1 a minute.
>> Yes.
>> It's really, really worth it. And again, I'm not gonna make this about that and about what cielo24 does. But I'll certainly link the articles to how return on investment worth it is.


>> Yeah.
>> But what would you like to leave us parting today that you think that would be valuable to the community listening to this?
>> Yeah. So I think the biggest thing is just the able bodied community. I think the best thing that they can do is listen, like anytime I say something like hey, I would really appreciate it if X, Y and Z, thank you very much if they just listen and just kind of like reflect on that and then take it into account.

I think that 90% of the time, it has worked so well for me. For example, right now during the pandemic, we all have to wear masks obviously and with the mouth being covered-
>> Yeah.
>> It muffles the sound, and I also rely on lip reading. It's not super obvious to people that I rely on lip reading because I can hear, but I do.

So-
>> Sure.
>> With the sound being muffled, the next thing I would do is read a person's lips if I couldn't hear them but then the mouth is also covered. So during times like this, where I'm particularly struggling I didn't anticipate to encounter something like this ever in my entire life.


>> Mostly, didn't
>> Actually, I never anticipated that if I can't hear I can't read lips either because someone's mouth would be covered. So anyway I, for example, I'm the news editor. So every Tuesday we have deadline day, which means we will all gather in the newsroom. We all have our mask on, social distancing as much as we can, and we put the issue together.

Now everybody's sound is muffled and I can't read their lips. So I made like a public service announcement. The first day I knew this would be a problem. I said I need all of you to have your best annunciation your best, like clear loud voices as possible. I really appreciate that.

And me just saying that much anytime I can't hear someone for whatever reason, I just say hey, can you text me. We can sit right here and text each other good, whatever. So that kind of thing. We've figured it out. I haven't had too much of a problem and I think it's just by them listening and saying you know what, you're right.

That makes sense. You can't hear very well. Our mouths are covered. You know what, I am going to take this moment to try to annunciate very clearly. And anytime someone talks to me, I've noticed it they, they'll maybe they'll mumble at first like, my god, I'm so sorry.

I'm realizing that I'm not being very clear in what I'm saying then they they try again and they start over. And I just think it's like little things like that that make a huge difference. And it's really helped during this I really haven't had too much of a problem and I think it's just because I'm thankfully most people are willing to listen.


>> Okay, this is great. Thank you so much, Emily. Really appreciate your time today.
>> Thank you for having me.
>> Yeah, it's a really rich conversation and dialogue. And I think that when we have some discussions down the road about say the WCAG requirements for online video and how they're taking shape.

I would love to get you back on onto a panel discussion. Okay, fantastic. All right everybody, thank you for listening in to this episode. I am Nicole and this is Media TedTalk and until we meet again. Talk soon, bye bye.