A few days ago, YouTube added captioning/subtitle support to its videos. Users can upload their own SubViewer (.sub) or SubRip (.srt) files to videos. Viewers can turn on captioning (if enabled) by clicking on the bottom-right button on the player. Right now, however, YouTube doesn’t seem to offer a feature to search for captioned videos only. Got a favorite YouTube video you’ve been itching to watch with captions? According to TechCrunch, [...]

My uncle forwarded me this New York Times article about young John Cave Jr., a deaf student, who wanted to bring his service dog, Simba, to school. There is a cute picture of a Simba, a yellow Labrador, in the article. To summarize: the Nassau County school said no to the Cave family, “concluding that having a dog in school would provide no instructional benefit to the student, and could [...]

You love VRS, don’t you? It’s nearly achieved, for hundreds of thousands of deaf and hard-of-hearing people, what the ADA calls “functional equivalency.” That term means that the deaf person’s calling experience should be as similar as realistically possible to a hearing person picking up the phone, dialing, and speaking into the handset. We just turn on the TV, dial the VRS company, give them the number we want to [...]

Today’s issue of the Washington Post covers videophone technology as used in the deaf community. Both direct VP calling and VRS are discussed, and quotes from several deaf persons (including DeafDC.com’s own Rob Rice and Lisa Wilson) are peppered throughout the article. The title’s “Saying It With Feeling.” Whoo-whoo. Nothing that screams “DEAF” in that headline. And hey, 2.1 million minutes of VRS service in June 2005. That ain’t bad, [...]

The last person I knew that actively used a Wyndtell pager just bit the dust and switched over to T-Mobile’s Sidekick. His reason: half the pager’s screen suddenly went blank. Jim was the only person in my address book that still had “@wyndtell.com” next to it. No more. A quick look at www.wyndtell.com will tell you that you can STILL get a RIM 950 and use Wyndtell’s services (now owned [...]