Some members of the deaf community say a new music video is an insult. The video created by Mark Nakhla uses the Kanye West and Jay-Z song No Church in the Wild . Nakhla says he has studied ASL for a couple of years and
utilized "American Sign Language shapes and sign language gestures." But the National Association of the Deaf says the video is "not an ASL interpretation in any sense, shape or form." Judge for yourself by watching the video posted below on DeafNewsToday.com.
The FCC says video viewed over the Internet must have closed captioning, even if the material is displayed on a television. The agency is also requiring video distributors to make the captions of the same quality as those available on regular television broadcasts. The rules apply to new broadcasts and to reruns, 45 days after a TV rebroadcast. In four years, the FCC says the distributors will have only 15 days to turn around the captioning instead of 45 days. These new rules will start when they are officially published in the Federal Register.
There's a new site where you can take a look at the architectural history of the Tennessee School for the Deaf in Knoxville. The exhibit was put together by the Tennessee Virtual Archive and features images of the unique buildings on the campus. Many of these structures were designed by noted deaf architect Thomas Scott Marr in the 1920s. Marr graduated from the school and went on to found a prominent Nashville architectural firm that carried his name - Marr and Holman. You'll find the site here.
Google says it's expanding the captioning possibilities YouTube. Captioning was first introduced to the video sharing site back in 2006 and now, there will be more language and search options for users. YouTube supports automatic captions in Japanese, Korean and English. Captioning can be added, though not automatically, in another 155 languages. Another help is ability to change the color of the captions so the text is more legible against the video background. There's also better formatting for broadcast video, where the text is often positioned near the person speaking. Google says is also making it easier to upload videos that already have embedded captions
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A lawsuit against CNN over captioning will move forward. A US Magistrate in Oakland refused to dismiss the suit on the grounds it violates the news network's First Amendment rights. The lawsuit was brought on behalf of deaf Californians who are hoping to set a precident for the entire news industry. CNN already provides captioning on its television broadcast, as required by law, but does not on its website. New FCC rules will soon require recently captioning for professionally produced online videos, including newscasts, but the regulations do not cover short clips of less than 3 minutes or so.
It started a month ago with a Toronto man in a dark brown wig spouting common phrases used by women. IT was Graydon Sheppard in the wig, pretending to be a girl. He's the face in a video that went viral called S- Girls Say. Its success has spawned a number of imitators, from Asian women to vegans and fathers and black girls. Now are several about S- Hearing People Say, even though sites like Gawker and Huffington Post have pleaded with people to quit creating them. One of them is posted below.
The PBS NewsHour will use volunteers to caption its election coverage, thanks to funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB). A $420,000 grant will be used for the project, set to launch Tuesday night (Jan 24) with the President's State of the Union address. Besides providing captioning for the deaf, the funds will be used for translation into dozens of languages including Dutch and Chinese.
Greg Hlibok took over the FCC's Disability Rights Office a year ago. Hlibok has been profoundly deaf since birth. After studying engineering, he later became the first deaf law student at Hofstra University and at the age of 43 has become the first chief of the office to have a disability. His job is to help put into place a law that requires digital technology creators to make their materials available to the blind and deaf. Hlibok is best known in the Deaf community as the student body president of Gallaudet University during the 1988 Deaf President Now protest.
Hollywood want the FCC to lighten up on it's proposed captioning rules for captioning TV shows on the Internet. The Motion Picture Association of America is asking for more time, claiming a six month deadline is a nearly an impossible task (some video categories would get a year under the FCC's plan). Film and TV show producers say, in a letter to the Commission, that its voluntary approach was working just fine before the FCC proposed new rules to force them to move quicker. What's pushing the discussion is a requirement by the Twenty-First Century Communications & Video Accessibility Act, that the FCC come up with new regulations for closed captioning for shows available on the Internet by January 12, 2012. The Commission wants the captioning of major TV shows as they re-air. But the Association is suggesting it work on the basis of when a show was originally produced. It is asking for 48 months to get the video on their own websites captioned, 72 months for shows on other websites produced since 2006, and 96 months to get shows on other websites created before 2006. The FCC does not require the captioning of clips or outtakes, only full-length shows and the regulations do not apply to individuals who are posting video.
The UK's Daily Mail has published an article in its online edition here that sounds pretty disturbing to readers. The article tells about police in Sunderland, England arresting a deaf man for what they thought were obscene gestures aimed at them, thought the man says he was only trying to tell them he was deaf. The problem is that this happened nine years ago. A fact not mentioned in the article. In 2002, Shaun Phuprate was charged with being drunk and disorderly, along with his brother who tried to intervene. Local magistrates later threw the case out. The Daily Mail itself ran the article in 2002 which you can see here.
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