#captionTHIS!

Submitted by Jeannette Johnson [1] on Wed, 06/06/2012 - 10:22

Today is the day of the #captionTHIS social movement in social media (Twitter, Facebook, Google+, etc.). What's this campaign all about, you ask? Thanks to the 21st Century Video Communications and Accessibility Act, more and more content are being captioned, but one glaring loophole in the law is that any content that's posted only online, and not on television, is not required to be captioned. This is a deep concern because more and more video content is being posted solely online. The National Association of the Deaf (NAD) and other deaf consumer organizations are fighting to close this loophole. However, this kind of struggle cannot be won by just our organizations, alone. We need you. The NAD and other organizations need your full support and participation to help make online videos 100% accessible! That means the mainstream media and legislators need to see our faces and hands.

This is where the #captionTHIS comes in today. The brainchild of Adam Jarashow [2] and Megan Malzkuhn [3], #captionTHIS is a social media movement which pushes for captioning of online videos. Today is the day where we, the Deaf Community and allies, blitz the media and other companies that produce online content, to do the right thing and caption their videos!

If you have a Twitter account, use the hashtag (#) with the words, captionTHIS (i.e. #captionTHIS) and tweet to the media outlets using (@, i.e. @CNN, etc.) that do not caption thier online videos, something like this, "Your videos are not captioned, leaving out millions of Deaf Americans. Caption your videos! #captionTHIS!"

It is crucial that you include '#captionTHIS' in your tweets, so people will know the Deaf Community is speaking as one. You can do the same on Facebook - find a company's Facebook page, then leave a message on their page, sharing the same message. If you do not have Facebook or Twitter, you can still participate in this important movement! How? Send out emails to these companies and tell them to caption their online videos! Don't know where to start? The Deaf Politics blog [4] has an excellent list of companies' emails and an email template that you can use.

Let's all speak as one, and make this day go down in history where the media and legislators realized that we are indeed, a force to be reckoned with. 

#captionTHIS!