Here’s a nightmare for our times: You’re in a meeting or family gathering or whatever on Zoom, and everybody else is on mute. You can see that everyone is talking and having a grand old time, but you have no idea what they’re saying. And you can’t unmute them.
“The lack of . . . captions on Zoom has taken a huge emotional toll on people with hearing loss during the pandemic.”
It sounds pretty scary, and it’s a problem a lot of deaf people have when trying to participate on Zoom. In order to know what’s being said in a forum like Zoom, a lot of deaf people need closed captioning, where words appear on the screen like a subtitled movie.
But in December, two deaf men filed a federal lawsuit against Zoom because, the plaintiffs say, they can’t access the captioning they need to fully participate on Zoom without paying a monthly fee. The lawsuit asserts that this inaccessibility violates the Americans with Disabilities Act, and the plaintiffs want all deaf people to be able to access all of the captioning they need for free.
They aren’t the first people to complain. Blogger Shari Eberts is founder of an online community called Living With Hearing Loss. Eberts is hard of hearing, and she started a petition last spring that now has more than 78,000 signatures. The petition demanded that Zoom, Google, and Microsoft make appropriate captioning available for free on their various online meeting platforms.
In an op-ed that appeared in The Washington Post in December, Eberts wrote that Google and Microsoft quickly made automatic speech recognition captions available on their platforms, leaving only Zoom inaccessible to those who do not pay a monthly fee.
“The lack of . . . captions on Zoom has taken a huge emotional toll on people with hearing loss during the pandemic,” she wrote. “Everything has moved online: work, school, social interactions, and entertainment. Imagine eight months of social isolation, not only without in-person visits with family and friends, but without the ability to converse comfortably virtually either.”
I contacted Zoom to see if anybody was willing to discuss this. I got a statement from a spokesperson that pointed out all of the other disability access features Zoom offers. The statement said:
“As part of our commitment to connecting users across the world, we are focused on providing an accessible platform for diverse communities and continually enhancing our features in support of that mission. . . . We are working towards making automatic closed captioning available to all of our users this year.”
This year? That means that deaf people who want to use Zoom like everyone else shouldn’t have to wait more than eleven and a half more months.