By Cheryl Dowden, June 4, 2020
Below please find a copy of an email sent to the HSVPOA Board and Interim General Manager, John Paul, requesting closed captioning be provided on the Official HSVPOA YouTube videos.
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Hello HSVPOA Board Members and Interim General Manager John Paul,
Thank you for all your hard work for the community. It is much appreciated.
This email is being written on behalf of the hearing-impaired members of Hot Springs Village Property Owners Association.
There are many hearing-impaired individuals in this community and this makes it very difficult for them to view meetings and/or YouTube videos. Due to this, we would like to formally request that the HSVPOA staff enable the closed captioning option on the official HSVPOA YouTube channel.
We understand the captioning is not always 100% accurate, but hearing-impaired people use a combination of captioning and lip reading in order to understand a video.
A disclaimer could be placed in the “Description Box” or the “About” section on YouTube as to the fact that the complete accuracy of the closed captioning on the videos is not guaranteed.
This could be done for ZERO cost to the association and is very easy to do.
We feel that by the POA allowing the closed captioning, it would provide a valuable service to the hard of hearing in the community and be a wonderful gesture of transparency and goodwill in regards to these very valued hearing-impaired members.
We look forward to your response regarding this issue. Thank you again for all you do and for your kind consideration of this request.
Kind regards,
Joe and Cheryl Dowden
Edited to add: The correct term should be, “hard-of-hearing,” not hearing-impaired. We apologize if we offended anyone.
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We will update this website when we receive a response.
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Joseph Vlasek
06/04/2020 — 4:23 pm
Thank You
Max
06/04/2020 — 4:42 pm
I like the closed captioning idea better than the sign language idea. Not many people have learned sign language. I like the idea of no cost.
Chipmunk
06/04/2020 — 4:42 pm
Much needed. Thanks for asking. Hope they act on this as requested.
They also need to figure out how to take questions, comments and suggestions in real time during the meeting. This isn’t rocket science. Let one of them take emails and pause every so often to respond for their audience. Otherwise folks are going to stop listening.
They also need to give a little background on topics they are discussing. Just because they had some previous closed door discussion and/or met at someone’s house, etc., none of us in the audience has a clue about any of that. Besides many of us having impaired hearing, we can’t read minds.
And please extend some internet capabilities and install TVs in the woods. Us chippies are having a hard time keeping up.
HSVP C
06/04/2020 — 5:35 pm
You are welcome. We appreciate your support.
Miriam Shively
06/04/2020 — 5:26 pm
Thank you for asking. I was wondering to whom to direct this inquiry.
HSVP C
06/04/2020 — 5:35 pm
You are welcome. I tried a number of times with the past Board and it just fell on deaf ears. They did not care. I think this Board will give this to us.
Greg
06/04/2020 — 9:25 pm
Good idea
DanO2
06/04/2020 — 9:50 pm
It fell on deaf ears? Rather ironic. 😊 Thank you for doing this!
HSVP C
06/04/2020 — 11:02 pm
Dan, LOL. You are welcome. We have been trying to get this for a while now.
Gene Garner
06/05/2020 — 7:21 am
An excellent idea Cheryl and Joe. I use CC when watching Directv not because I’m hard of hearing but because the audio varies so much and it’s easy to miss words.
I can imagine when I do start losing my hearing how frustrating it will be to misinterpret what’s being said. —Gene
Susan Viecelli
06/05/2020 — 2:15 pm
Closed captioning is good, just in case you “missed” what was said. Clarity is a good thing!
Thanks for suggesting this!
Dan Boehmke
06/06/2020 — 2:40 pm
Don’t get me wrong, no one can disagree with the merit of this idea but technically, “It doesn’t just happen”. Just please Google to find out the general cost and time needed to add CC to a video. Both would probably make it unrealistic for HSV.
HSVP C
06/06/2020 — 2:46 pm
Dan, we are not asking for anything that costs money. It is a free service provided by YouTube.
Dan Boehmke
06/06/2020 — 5:51 pm
I understand but we have to remember that we and the POA expect “Accurate” interpretation and transcription (Not sure that is ever achievable in today’s world! LOL, that’s meant as a joke – so don’t blow up on me please) but Youtube says: “Note: These automatic captions are generated by machine learning algorithms, so the quality of the captions may vary. We encourage creators to provide professional captions first. YouTube is constantly improving its speech recognition technology. However, automatic captions might misrepresent the spoken content due to mispronunciations, accents, dialects, or background noise. You should always review automatic captions and edit any parts that haven’t been properly transcribed.”
Just something to consider in a reasonable discussion?
HSVP C
06/06/2020 — 6:21 pm
Dan, I understand. My husband is hearing impaired and he says between lip reading and the captioning he can understand. We know it is not perfect and I mentioned that in the letter. The POA could put a disclaimer in the description box. We don’t want the POA to have to hire someone to sign the meetings or pay for someone to caption them, we are asking for this free option. It is not really fair to exclude the deaf community.
Tom Blakeman
06/09/2020 — 7:47 am
Live news and almost any other live program is captioned In real time on TV every day and has been so done for decades. Often the words are not 100% accurate but they give a helpful rendering of what’s being said. In fact they provide comic relief in some instances. Nobody ever gets sued over this.
Other communities do this for their meetings. It is normal and expected in today’s world. I’m confident that when this board realizes their mistake they will fix it.
Moreover, whether it is actually free or costs a few bucks is not an excuse either. The Village just received $3MM of free money from the Feds. Surely they can find a few bucks somewhere to cover any nominal cost, should there be any at all.
Julie
06/08/2020 — 5:17 am
We also need translation services to interpret the crazy names the little “ceo” and others gave to stuff. Wayfinding, charrette, pocket neighborhoods, walk ability, polycentric superstructure, human scale, brownfields, grayfields, infill, mixed use neighborhood, and all the other claptrap we have had to endure the past several years.
Insanity. Pure, unmitigated insanity.