Let’s talk about an under-appreciated aspect of switching from live presentations to prerecorded videos at conferences: it is inherently unfair to deaf presenters who present using sign language. See, for a live presentation, you work with the live sign language interpreter. 1/

It’s the responsibility of the venue to provide said interpreter. But no such analog applies for prerecorded videos. In order to make them accessible, you need voiceover. Many deaf signers aren’t able to do that on their own. 2/

Even if you are lucky to have help for the voiceover (such as @rajakushalnagar‘s son ), you still need to edit the audio into the video. That’s no small feat due to the timing mismatch between the ASL and English. Really hard to do for a deaf person w/ limited listening. 3/

And then the captioning. Captioning ASL is fairly easy. Captioning the voiceover, not so much if you’re deaf. Since the captions must match the voiceover for our sign language-impaired colleagues, that means more careful listening and synchronization. 4/

To sum up, we’re doubly disadvantaged. We’re on our own with the ASL to English, and again with the captioning. Both of which are taken care of in a live conference presentation. No wonder that preparing our #ASSETS2020 presentation was such an ordeal. 5/

I’ll be sure to give this a good think for my role in the next ASSETS conference. There are better ways - such as #SLRTP at ECCV2020, which took on the interpretation, voiceover and captioning of prerecorded videos. /end