Audio Slideshows, to subtitle, or not to subtitle?

Interesting thoughts by Craig Butcher about whether enough is being done to make multimedia accessible to people with hearing impairments.

I have to mention that I am an advocate in web accessibility and am not clearly impressed by the current offering that audio slideshows that exists today. They are broken, literally broken, that it doesn’t deliver the work in full quality.

Craig argues that it should be compulsory for all multimedia to have subtitles so that people with hearing problems and those for whom English is a second language can follow the work.

1) It should be compulsory for multimedia work by photographers to install subtitles into their audio slideshow work. This, I strongly believe should be taught during any photography courses especially in modules that focus on promoting their work using websites.

Masking it ‘compulsory’ seems a bit draconian to me. What about the huge numbers of people who can’t read  English, should we produce versions of each video in Chinese, Russian or Spanish?

I agree though that we should be teaching subtitling as ‘best practice’. That would be a positive step forward. Better that people understand the issue as opposed to being forced to do something.

Thanks to Craig for raising this important issue.