Mel Chua talks about speech input and captions as a Deaf individual

Mel Chua tells us that the onus shouldn't be on her to request accessibility accommodations - it should be there from the start. And she shouldn't be made to feel as if providing accommodations is something generous the service provider is doing. Thanks to Tenon for sponsoring the transcript for this episode. ASL Version Mel and I agreed that it would be a good idea to provide this show in ASL as well. Mel was good enough to use the transcript to re-enact our conversation in ASL. Transcript Nic: Hi, I'm Nic Steenhout. You're listening to the Accessibility Rules Soundbite, a series of short podcasts where people with disabilities explain their impairments and what barriers they encounter on the web. Thanks to Tenon for sponsoring the transcript for this episode. Tenon provide accessibility as a service. They offer testing, training, and tooling to help fix accessibility fast. Nic: Today I'm speaking with Mel Chua. Mel is working in the technology field. She describes herself as a hacker. Welcome on the show, Mel. Mel: Thank you for having me. For those of you who are listening to the audio version, one thing you might notice is that my voice is gonna come at a bit of delay in the questions, and the reason for that is that I'm Deaf and I'm getting the call through American Sign Language interpreter, and then I'm using my voice to speak back but we're also going to be making a signed version of this at the conclusion of the recording. What else do you want to know? Nic: You mentioned you're Deaf, can you tell us a little bit more about how your disability or your impairment ... How does that work on the web? What kind of barriers do you encounter? Mel: Well, so yeah. So expanding on that a little bit, I'm Deaf. I grew up Deaf. I also happen to be one of the Deaf people for whom speech therapy and cochlear implants and hearing aids have worked out. That's not everybody. They're not magic. And whether you can use your voice or not has no bearing on how intelligent you are, how educated you are, anything like that. But what that meant for me is that there's something that I can only do in one direction on the web. So for instance, like this, I can use my voice to speak, but I can't use my ears to listen. So audio input doesn't really work, even if speech output does. Also things like speech recognition tend to not work very well with Deaf voices like mine. I have a different kind of resonant quality to my voice, typically more nasal because that's something that a lot of folks will do. You speak further back in your skull so you can feel your voice instead of hearing it. It give you more tactile feedback. And then I'll drop consonants and randomly mispronounce things because I'll read words, but I've never heard them said. So that kind of thing makes the growing trend towards speech recognition very difficult to use because I basically can't get Alexa or anything to understand what I'm saying. Mel: Then of course there's stuff like captions and podcasts. So it's a little bit weird to be on a podcast right now because I don't listen to them. I basically can't. Very, very, very few podcasts have transcripts and other things that make them accessible to folks like me with hearing loss. I also do a lot of my work in ASL, American Sign Language. So I'm based in the US and so that's the sign language that I'm most fluent in. Other countries, other people around the world perhaps have different kinds of sign language. But very little content is available in sign language in general. And so for someone like me who's also fluent in English, transcripts or captions, it's actually okay because I'm a native reader of English, I can follow along just fine. But especially imagine you were a Deaf kid and you're still learning to read. Like the captions are not going to be a very workable tool for you and following along that cool YouTube cartoon that your brother has found. Mel: So those are a couple of things