DPAN.tv's coverage of the first presidential debate, which featured ASL interpreters for President ... [+]
“If you guys make any of my TikToks viral, pls make it this one – it’s so important.”
That was the plea that young Erin Sydney Rosenfeld led off with on her now viral TikTok post as she vented her frustration during the first presidential debate on Sept. 29. She was just one of the millions of deaf and hard of hearing Americans trying to watch the debates in real time on a national broadcast or cable network despite the lack of fully accessible options.
The post got right to the point: “Okay, so I'm really frustrated right now because I'm trying to watch the presidential debate, but there's not an ASL (American Sign Language) interpreter. There's nothing, and it's live TV, so CC (closed captions) or subtitles don't work; they're really delayed. It's not accessible, it's not equal access, and it's not right,” she wrote. “It's really frustrating because I'm finally old enough to vote, and I can't even watch the debate.”
Rosenfeld’s post hit a big nerve because it pointed to a big problem: Not only is simply casting a private and independent accessible ballot not possible in many states, just getting informed about the candidates through this most immediate, visceral and telling format is also out of reach, even though it is fully available to the general public. Why is access to real-time ASL interpretation or top-quality captioning of these momentous national moments still out of sight?
Actually, it’s not – but you need to know where to look. That would be DPAN.tv, a web site that streams the debates with live ASL interpreters and best-in-class captioning. But, just like visiting any foreign country, you’ll need an insider to connect you to this unofficial, semi-underground route to the information that most Americans can access by switching on their televisions without a second thought (that is, if they still have the wherewithal to pay their cable bill or haven’t pawned their TV yet).
DPAN.tv (Deaf Professional Artists Network) is where a deaf person can follow the debate action, insult for insult, fly for fly, along with the rest of the nation, if they know about it.
Yet they don’t. For example, two of the highly accomplished deaf and hard-of-hearing people I contacted for this article, all of whom are well-connected in deaf culture, were unaware of DPAN.tv. That’s because information for the disabled about solutions, workarounds, technologies and resources lives in an ever-growing ecology that is hard to track or even find. If you don’t know where to look, if you aren’t connected to the right community, if you’re newly disabled or getting old and experiencing age-related hearing changes, and you just tune in to a major news outlets, you will be in the dark.
“I don’t watch the debates,” disability rights advocate Haben Girma, author of Haben: The DeafBlind Woman Who Conquered Harvard Law, told me in an email. “I read reviews in articles, so that’s how I get the news.”
Jay Zimmerman, a deaf musician and composer in New York City, expressed a common view of closed captioning for live events: "Captions for live news and streamed events are usually so awful I have stopped watching anything live except when absolutely necessary,” he said. “The words appear very, very late and are often wrong … it becomes like an endless stream of garbled text flowing past your eyeballs while you try to match up the words with the visual actions you just saw. It's just exhausting and brain draining.”
Zimmerman, who told me about DPAN.tv, usually waits for transcripts to appear so he can read them.
Marc Safman, a deafblind expert in financial crimes compliance in the banking and legal industries, does much the same: “Closed Captions do not work for me since they are too small and move too fast. Without decent live captions I am not going to follow these things at all. I read the reports, watch the videos to watch the body language, facial expressions, clothing, listen for audience reactions.”
Nonetheless, says Sean Forbes, the founder of DPAN.tv, “there’s a large community of deaf and hard of hearing individuals who rely on captions.” Live captioners in government apparently do a better job than those used by the networks; he and Zimmerman both point to C-SPAN as providing reliable captioning for the debates and other live events such as congressional hearings.
“The need for captioning also extends to people for whom English is a second language, and even people who prefer to watch in bars and restaurants where captioning is sometimes required to be displayed by law, and many many other situations and populations need or want captioning,” Zimmerman wrote in an email. “So providing proper and accurate closed captions are just the bare minimum we should expect. Instead of closed captions, for a public debate they should be open captioned.” (Open captions are embedded in the image and cannot be turned off by the viewer.)
Zimmerman’s statement highlights the meager efforts to provide real public accommodation practiced by most major news organizations. But it’s right in sync with the approach of building owners and web developers who fail to incorporate accessibility into their products.
The long, still-unwinding road to accessible broadcasting for the deaf and hard of hearing is emblematic of so much of the mainstream approach to so-called inclusion. Alice Wong, the editor of the recently published collection Disability/Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century, echoed this in remarks in October during a virtual forum on her book hosted by the NYU Center for Disability Studies. She described “the glacial pace of change” around action and attitude toward accessibility and disability, adding dismissively “We have to feel grateful for the crumbs.”
Broadcasters and cable operators may think they are keeping an eye on the bottom line–even though adding in live ASL interpreters and captioners is a negligible cost for such operations–because accessibility remains an afterthought. Adding it in becomes an obstacle, an add-on that somehow disturbs the texture of television.
Have we not moved far from Garrett Morris offering “News for the Hard of Hearing” during Weekend Update on Saturday Night Live in the 1970s?
DPAN.tv did not begin with the goal of connecting the deaf to key live news events. Instead, it was Founded in 2006 by deaf musician Sean Forbes to connect deaf and hard-of-hearing artists. “We were really focused on making the music industry accessible,” Forbes told Forbes.com in a recent interview. “So many things were inaccessible,” he says, that in 2016, urged by colleagues, he realized that he could make the coming Clinton-Trump debates accessible. “It was a simple idea, so we streamed it, and the first debate had half a million people watching.” What they saw was a changing cast of six hearing interpreters, two each for the candidates and the moderator (the interpreters would switch out when one got fatigued). Suddenly, Forbes noted, “we had a following.”
Forbes says DPAN.tv prepares its live captioners and ASL interpreters well in advance of the debates to make sure they understand the subject matter and know correct spelling for names, plus titles and organizations, so that they can follow the discussion–assuming anyone can follow the discussion, or that it’s an actual discussion.
For this year’s debates, DPAN.tv has taken its stable of ASL interpreters to the next level: A team of three hearing interpreters relays the words of the candidates and moderator to a team of three deaf interpreters, who then relay it to the audience. Why this extra step?
“It’s about empowering the deaf community. It’s so much more rewarding,” he says. Because the communication is coming from “someone with the passion and intent, you get a much better product.”
As for what the interpreters should do when the candidates interrupt and speak over each other? “Just be as authentic as possible,” says Forbes.
As important as the efforts of Sean Forbes at DPAN.tv and others are, Erin Rosenfeld is likely to continue to be frustrated if she wants to see ASL on network television in “the deaf community can't watch/can't understand what's happening,” she wrote, concluding her TikTok post. “It's not fair and we need to push for change, push for interpreters to be at all debates and on screen the whole time.”
Peter Slatin is an Encore Public Voices fellow.
