> deaf or hard-of-hearing people should be able to enjoy the programs
This is really important. I have moderate hearing loss but can hear 'okay' with a hearing aid. I place where I worked had a lot of mandatory training that involved video presentations. They introduced one new video and I realised that there was one bit where some important info (it was needed to pass the post video test) was only presented in spoken form, with no transcript or captions. I could follow it but a person with profound hearing loss would have struggled. Because I am sensitised to accessibility issues I decided to make a fuss about this.
In a superb piece of irony, the subject of the training video was actually diversity issues in the workplace. I therefore contacted the training department saying "Did you know that your diversity training discriminates against deaf people?" To give them credit, they said 'oops our bad' and quickly added captions.
That sounds very frustrating. More frustrating than me explaining to senior mgmt why we need to spend money on a11y.
Your example is a great one, but aside from audio and visual problems, a11y covers things like cognitive deficits, which, for some, make watching and learning from videos difficult.
> I decided to make a fuss about this.
Good on you, more people need to be making a fuss about this.
I actually wrote Chris Croyier about a small snippet of example code on his site (CSS-Tricks) that didn't follow a11y best practices. He replied, and updated the code! Nice guy.
