Deaf & Hard of Hearing

The Deaf and hard-of-hearing community is not one thing. It includes culturally Deaf people whose first language is a sign language, late-deafened adults who grew up speaking, people who use cochlear implants or hearing aids, and hard-of-hearing people with a wide spectrum of residual hearing. Access needs vary a lot: signed video, captions, transcripts, amplified audio.

One W3C user story is Dhruv, a mature student who is deaf and a sign language user. He studies online and relies on real-time human-typed captions in lectures, edited captions on assigned videos, and the ability to adjust caption size, colour, and position. Auto-captions help sometimes but cause problems with specialist vocabulary. Dhruv's experience is one perspective, not a summary of Deaf culture or sign language users as a whole.

Provide accurate, human-reviewed captions on all video and audio. Let users adjust caption size, contrast, and position. Offer transcripts. Support signed video by letting users pin or resize an interpreter's feed. And use clear writing: for many Deaf people, the written language of a site is a second language.