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Jamie Berke
Deafness Blog

By Jamie Berke, About.com Guide to Deafness

In the News: Some Signs with that Coffee?

Thursday June 21, 2007
From time to time, I enjoy reading articles about deaf people working at various locations. Today I read about the deaf barista, Ali Jordan, working at a Philadelphia Starbucks. The story is accompanied by a video clip - uncaptioned, as usual.

You would think that whenever the mainstream media airs something on the web about deafness, they would at least make an effort to add subtitles knowing that some of the people watching are bound to be deaf themselves! Long ago in 1998, I invented a term that described this type of failure to think about the needs of deaf people - Jonah Syndrome. Jonah Syndrome still seems rather widespread, I'm sorry to say.

Comments

June 22, 2007 at 8:20 pm
(1) Hana says:

That’s so silly that the video is not captioned. Don’t they know that it’s contradictory to feature the very first deaf barista and not provide captioning for fellow deaf people to understand?

July 3, 2007 at 9:11 am
(2) Ivy says:

Not only is it silly, but, correct me if I am wrong, it is illegal. if it is for the public use, it is supposed to be cc’ed. All videos, dvds,tv’s,etc. are to be captioning equipped for that reason.

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