Tuesday, May 13, 2008

Disaboom and Barack

CNN Money has an article on how Barak Obama has a profile on Disaboom, "premier resource and on line community for people living with or touched by disability." His profile notes that he has been a member since March 11, 2008.
The article notes that the profile has


"position statements, his record on disability issues, a blog detailing both campaign events and key statements, video messaging from Obama, and opportunities for Disaboom community members to ask questions of the candidate and participate in political forums."

Reviewing the blog entries, they appear to be largely press releases, and testimonials. I clicked through from his profile page on the Disabilities link and was taken to his campaign site on a section regarding disabilities. The featured video, though it says its captioned by Project Read On, there was no captioning and nothing to turn it on, nor is there a transcript. To be fair, the video channel on his site, Barack TV does have a captioning link on the right site, which allows the user to view the video in a pop up window with captioning. I was unable to find the disability video on Barack TV though.
A bit of equal time here, Hillary Clinton's site has 144 videos, of which 34 are captioned, and she uses the same Project Read on for her captioning. However, it is through a pop up reader, which is not in time with the video unless they're started at the same time.
And John McCain? Well, his site has many videos and no indication whether they're captioned (though that's not to say they're not though, but I couldn't find one that was.) On a hunch, I thought I'd check out Project Read On since his Democratic contenders are using them for captioning, but no luck.

Though not where I intended to take this post, this quick swing of the candidates sites has been interesting. Look for yourself, and see what your candidate has to say.
I have e-mailed all three campaigns regarding the captioning (or lack of it), and will keep you posted regarding the results.

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