I work for Opera and one of the things we have tried to do over the last 18 months is offer transcription of podcasts as sponsorship for as many conferences as we can. This has included Scripting Enabled 2008, Web Directions North 2009, dConstruct 2008 and Geek in the Park 2008. In the pipeline we have dConstruct 2009. and Accessibility 2.0.

There is also other work raising awareness and working on solutions for deaf and hard of hearing users such as Captioning Sucks! (http://captioningsucks.com/).

I think there’s a lot to be done and something that we need to spotlight more as you say.

Hearing loss is the most misunderstood and ignored of all disabilities. No wonder why Helen Keller said: “Blindness cuts us off from things, but deafness cuts us off from people.” It is the communication issue that makes us feel isolated from hearing people.

I would also like to add more facts:

- Hearing loss is a public health issue that is THIRD (!) in line only to heart disease and arthritis.
- Over 40 million (20%) of Americans have hearing loss.
- Over 100 million Americans need access to captioning (not just deaf, but also foreigners, adults and children learning to read, etc.)

With this in mind, it is important that all audio media is to be coupled with text versions to those who need it.

It is also required as Priority I of W3C guidelines, by the ADA and DDA and other disability laws.

Actually, we feel that blind users have more access to the internet than deaf users do. Mostly because blind users share same communication needs as hearing users do.

This is another quote from Helen Keller.

These are code snippets Ben, and not intended to be in full as space didn’t allow.