Obama offers closed captioning for videos

Barack Obama's videos now offer closed captioning for the hearing impaired. You can check the service out at the Obama website (just make sure to allow pop-ups for the site). The site's blog explains the reasoning behind the service:

We recently received a call from Tom Faar, a veteran of the Gulf War who now works at Galludet University, the nation’s leading institute of higher learning for the deaf.

Tom, who spent much of his service listening to Morse code, had his hearing damaged, and many of his fellow soldiers lost their hearing altogether. “When you’re at war,” says Tom, “there are so many guns going off in your ears.”

Tom had a simple request: he asked that our online videos be made available with closed captioning. “So many of our Veterans are deaf or hard of hearing and they really depend on closed captioning,” he says. “People who are culturally deaf have no way to receive the message without it.”

Thanks to Tom, we have now launched a closed captioning site on our website— barackobama.com/closedcaptioning. Working with Project ReadOn we are generating closed captioning to our videos. There are currently nine videos available and we will continue to update more as well as regularly feature closed captioning in future videos.

“You know, in many ways, this constituency has been forgotten,” says Tom. “Obama’s campaign is the first to take this seriously and do something about it, and he’s got my support.”