Summer is here and some of us are spending some hard earned money to take a vacation. Some of travelers are also hearing impaired and are consumers of the airline and cruise industry.
Thirty-six million Americans are hearing impaired and/or deaf, yet we are still struggling to obtain captioning on television, the internet, movie theaters, Broadway shows and many other places. Within the next few weeks, I’ll be flying several planes and cruising to Alaska. However, I bet my airline ticket that the shows and movies offered won’t have captions.
So, what’s a customer to do? I am a full ticket paying customer who just wants to enjoy the flight and cruise like everyone else. I’m not deaf, and watching a show is more enjoyable when I understand what’s being said. The only way I am able to understand speech is through captions. I feel as though I spend half my life advocating and the other half learning about social media. I can’t help but say to myself, thirty-six million Americans are hearing impaired, why aren’t we all out there advocating for universal captioning?
Then again, could you imagine if we all showed up at the White House lawn to make a statement? Time to speak up. This country has allowed the silence to take over. The more silent we are, the less power we have to make change. Help advocate for captioning. How? Write the producers of non-captioned TV shows. Thank them producers who DO caption your favorite shows. Join the battle by joining CCAC http://www.ccacaptioning.org/ and get informed.
Educating yourself as a consumer is the most important thing. We deserve it.
Yep, I hear you!! I travel a lot , mostly in the U.S., but also abroad. It would have been so nice to watch a captioned movie or TV show on my flight to and from Ireland. Instead, I had the option of watching something I’d already seen — no figuring out the storyline required –, struggling to figure out something new without understanding the dialogue or environmental sounds, or just giving up and not watching anything at all. I chose to watch nothing at all and slept most of the flight to Dublin. However, on the return flight, I chose to watch the season opener of “Dexter”, as I had been waiting for it to come available on DVD. I did enjoy the show, but I’m clueless as to what exactly happened in several places. The visual is just not enough, and catching a word here or there by lipreading wasn’t enough to make sense of the dialogue, so I’ll still have to order the DVD. Sigh… it did help pass the time on the long, flight, though… especially since we were diverted to another airport and sat on the tarmac for hours. :o) You know all about that!! :o)
That’s something I’d like to see, Pearl, every single one of us 36 million Americans who are hearing impaired standing on the White House lawn!! Maybe then, the hearing public, organizations who post videos online, and providers in the travel industry and other places where captioning would help us, would get a visual grasp of how many frustrated people there are that NEED captioning. It’s not something extra we are asking for to simply stroke our egos, we really would just like to be able to understand as well as a hearing person!!
Have a great trip!!
I could not agree with you more. We need to make our voices heard, but it seems that the Congress and business are deaf to our needs.
I am ready and willing to march on DC if they rest of you will, we do need universal captions and we need them now.
CCAC is a great organization that has offered to help me in a situation and I have met some of the other members of CCAC and they are terrific advocates but we need more, many, many more.
So folks do check out ccac and join and also spread the word.
AMEN!