Jared Evans Global Microbrand

The i’s have been dotted and the t’s have been crossed. It’s now official that I will be joining the Information Technology team at Gallaudet University this October. Gallaudet University has always been on the list of places where I would like to work. After several meetings with Jon Mitchiner and getting rave reviews about him from others, the positive vibes tell me that I’m on the right path. I came away impressed with the network infrastructure changes the Gallaudet IT team has made over time, and I’m looking forward to working with them. Among the compelling projects I’ll be focusing on will be building the new disaster recovery datacenter and migrating the Peoplesoft business system to a different hardware/OS platform.

It will be hard to leave Viable Communications, where I’ve been for the last two years. I’ve been lucky to work with people of very high caliber who made possible innovative products, such as the VPAD. I’ve learned a lot from the capable IT team; dealing with a complicated network infrastructure, the engineers who can handle all the gritty details of VoIP signaling and embedded systems, PR/media team who have output some of the most dazzling video/advertisements seen in the VRS industry, and other strong operational people. I’ve also had the privilege of meeting many Viable interpreters in person and they are all an outstanding and talented bunch of people.

While it’s well known that Viable is currently in a difficult financial predicament, I sincerely hope that the planned acquisition by Snap will be completed and both companies will emerge stronger as a result. Despite what some of the current sentiment might be, Viable still has remarkable people and resources. Everyone at Viable took a risk in joining a young start-up company because they could see the impact the company could have on deaf community. With the Snap acquisition, they will be able to right the boat and set sail again.

I wish the very best to Viable/Snap people as they get through this difficult transition and have confidence they will be able to see this through. If you are at Gallaudet University, feel free to meet me at EMG building- I’m looking forward to seeing some familiar faces there and meeting new ones!

DCARA will be hosting a very special day this Saturday: Vblog Symposium during the day and a Wine & Cheese fund-raising event at night.

There will be a dizzying array of exciting presentations by experienced Deaf vbloggers which can be seen on the second page of this PDF.

I’m looking forward to bumping into them again and a few vbloggers I will be meeting for the first time!  I’m honored to be counted among these passionate personalities, whom in their own unique ways,  push for the betterment of the Deaf community.  All of their presentations will help the Deaf community understand better how to take advantage of vlogs and blogs to push for positive changes.

As for my presentation, it is titled “Being highly visible in the new world of social media.”  Some of you may recall, at the last DeafRead conference in 2008, I gave a presentation on how to make your blog more discoverable on the Internet and how to increase your blog traffic by understanding how to attract potential visitors.

At the time, vblogs were the mainstay of social media on the Internet and nearly everything revolved around them.  How times have changed since then: The rise and dominance of Facebook in the Deaf community and Twitter starting to heat up among the Deaf.  Social media has already started to diverse and as a result the role of vblogs has evolved to fit into this new scheme of things.

My presentation will have a short recap about vblogs then expand upon how well vblogs, Facebook and Twitter reinforce each other.

I want to say a BIG thanks to DCARA and especially LaRonda for taking the lead in setting up this innovative and desperately needed symposium for the deaf.  See you all this Saturday!

Great seeing the world-famous Jackie Chan sign in this video for Deaflympics at Taipei 2009!

NAD along with three Redskins fans Shane Feldman, Brian Kelly, and Paul Singleton have successfully sued the FedEx Field where Redskins games are hosted.  Because of them, the stadium will be more accessible to the deaf.  The judgment in this lawsuit was long in coming (ongoing since 2006) but they ultimately prevailed!  Hopefully, this will put all the other sports stadiums on alert that they must be able to meet the ADA requirements designed to include all fans who have paid the same ticket price as everyone else.

Link to NAD’s announcement.
Link to The Daily Record article.

The Malibu Beach Inn is offering a cutting-edge service, which I hope other hotels will follow suit.

When you check in as a guest at the Malibu Beach Inn, they will loan you an iPhone that is loaded with a special wireless hotel service application called runtriz.  Click on the image below to see what the application looks like and what kind of stuff you can do over the iPhone app. You’ll see that you can do basically everything!

This application would have a bonus side effect of provide better accessibility for deaf guests.  There’s no need to go down to the front desk to make the same kind of requests that hearing guests can make from the hotel phones.  Honestly, I’ve never ordered anything via the hotel TV with terrible and cumbersome interface using a remote.  I bet that would change if I was loaned this iPhone hotel service application.

Since this is a new and innovative approach to boosting service revenue, only swanky resorts such as Malibu Beach Inn, which attracts upper income bracket guests, can afford to implement and try out this premium service. 

I hope that eventually this innovative service will become more affordable and profitable from a business perspective which would go a long way in showing up in other hotel chains as a way to increase revenues and offering greater accessibility for the deaf.

I see this as one of the evolutionary steps towards automatically created voice-to-text transcripts that will eventually offer great benefit for both Deaf people and search engines.

Last month, Google Research included the voice-to-text capability on the “You Choose ‘08” page on the U.S. presidential race. On the “You Choose ‘08″ page, scroll down a bit to “What did the candidates say?” and you can search for a keyword in transcripts of what the candidates said inside video clips. If you move your mouse over the yellow markers on the video timeline, you’ll see a short text summary with the keyword.

Google Research admits that the automatic transcripts aren’t perfected yet, still I would like to be able to click a link to read the whole transcript. I would imagine that the next step in this evolution would be timecoding the transcript and offer an option to view the the subtitles directly near the bottom of the video clip as it’s being played.

How much is your deafness worth? Is there an economic value placed upon the ability to hear? The following article may give a rough estimation…

A car mechanic for the police department went deaf after working on sirens inside a garage. No idea why he didn’t take protective measures while on the job but he managed to successfully win a lawsuit against the department to the tune of £50,000 which is around $99,946 USD.

If he can amass this much money just for being deaf, I would like my $99,946 too!

There is one line that you will hear often from the members (hearing or Deaf) of the Deaf community: “It’s a small world!” I had many opportunities to expand the circle of people who I know when I was a student at NTID/RIT with thousands of other Deaf college students, visited friends at Gallaudet University, lived in the Deaf-friendly cities of Rochester and Washington DC, and worked at Deaf-owned companies of DawnSignPress and Viable.

Based upon my intuition and experience, the number of interconnections between Deaf people is very high and more persasive than is seen within the hearing world. This may be because Deaf people tend to congregate in certain swaths across the country and bump into each other more frequently. While my personal observations generally fall in line with what other Deaf people have experienced in similar social conditions- it is not yet a hard evidence for a high level of interconnections.

Enter Facebook. While Facebook is far from being a true representation of the Deaf community, there is a subset of hundreds of Deaf people who actively use Facebook. For a Facebook user, the primary purpose of the site is to explictly set the relationship links to other people who they know. As these relationship links are created one by one, a social map around the user is being built at the same time. Facebook offers many things you can do with your social map such as sharing updates, photos, videos, etc. It’s a great way to publish useful/silly tidbits for your friends to see when their schedule permits them to do so.

The social maps of the relationship links between Deaf Facebook users would give a much better picture of the level of interconnectivity among the Deaf. There happens to be a such Facebook app called Friend Wheel that will actually go through all your friends and create a visual map of all the interconnections! I present my Friend Wheel which contains 324 friends with 7,769 links between each other. [click on image to see it in its full-sized glory]

It’s one thing to rely on your intution and entirely a different thing to see the astounding image that has all the relationships actually graphed out. It’s a small world after all!

Jott is a voice recognition and message-sending system. After reading this review by Jason Kolb, I could immediately see an additional benefit using Jott to facilitate communication between hearing and deaf people.

Hearing people can dial the Jott phone number and have their verbal message automatically transcribed into an email which is then sent to the Deaf person.

Unfortunately, Jott is currently only one way street from the hearing caller to the Deaf person. It could become even more of a killer app if the Deaf person was able to reply to this email and have Jott’s servers transcribe the text into a voice call back to the hearing caller. This would be even more simpler to implement since text-to-voice feature is much less complex than voice-to-text (have to deal with accents/background noises/muddled audio/etc).

**update** Heather signed up for a Jott account and was able to send me a voice message automatically transcribed into an text email. She had to speak more slowly than normal and clearly but it works like a charm. Only if I could reply back to her! Hope this will be on Jott’s list of future features!

David Rosenbaum and Andrew Veith have developed and launched an interesting website called DEAF411. Deaf411 will be taking on the challenge of identifying how cities are considered deaf-friendly. Deaf411 will be researching and collecting information on which cities are deaf-friendly and what it takes to be considered deaf-friendly. They will produce a report which will be helpful if you are planning on a trip or a move to a new city and you are curious what kind of things a city would be able to offer its local deaf community. This report will be available to everyone at no charge.

Be sure to watch their blog at http://deaf411online.com/blog which will be chock-full of interesting information from a deaf perspective on issues related to being “Deaf-Friendly”!

Nouvelle Star is the French version of “American Idol.” This link will take you to a video clip where Magali, a Deaf woman, who was fortunate enough to get an audition on the show and performed a song in LSF (French Sign Language). My minuscule knowledge of LSF didn’t allow me to be able to catch everything she said. While it turns out that she didn’t win during this round, she touched the hearts of the judges. Magali was obviously happy to get the chance to do perform on national TV, even if the show was audiologically biased. This is yet more excellent exposure to signed language in other countries.

Y at-il quelqu’un qui sait LSF et peut faire une traduction dans les commentaires ci-dessous?
(Is there anyone out there who know LSF and can put a translation in the comments below?)

Thanks to BLOGVISUALSEÑASEXTREMEÑA for leading me to the video!

I have been waiting with great anticipation for the day when hulu.com would open their doors to the hordes who wanted to watch TV shows on the web. Their grand opening was today!

So far, I’m pretty impressed with the collection of TV shows that have been made available for viewing on Hulu.com. I could see myself watching a TV show on hulu.com if there was nothing good on TV.

Of course, the big question on my mind: Are the TV shows subtitled or not? As a Deaf person, I’m often frustrated by many media sites when the subtitling of video clips is not included in their workflow for the conversion from the original format into a format suitable for web consumption. Media companies, a note for you all: Subtitling a video clip is not difficult task to accomplish!

So far, Hulu.com has been a mixed blessing. I jumped across several shows until I came upon one of my favorite TV shows, The Simpsons. What did I see? A “CC” icon! I was able to watch an entire Simpsons episode online with subtitles! Hulu.com has taken several promising steps toward the subtitling of the video clips. I’m glad that they at least displayed a few clips with subtitles so we know they have already developed the capability. The next step for Hulu.com is to put up a guarantee that their conversion process will always include subtitles for all TV shows where available.

Here’s a captioned Simpson episode for you to watch! [move your mouse over the video, you'll see the CC icon and select 'English']

http://www.hulu.com/watch/9603/the-simpsons-love-springfieldian-style

I was heartened see how the recent Pepsi Superbowl Ad “Bob’s house“, showcased American Sign Language by adapting a joke from Deaf culture to fit the Super Bowl theme. Often, when Hollywood tries to take on Deaf culture, something is lost in translation and causes Deaf people to roll up their eyes and say “That’s not how it really is for Deaf people.” This usually holds true in past episodes on television shows where the plots incorporates several Deaf actors using sign language. The behavior of the Deaf actors often are slightly twisted out of reality in order to dramatize and highlight the conflicts in the show. However, Pepsi’s superbowl ad didn’t have any hint of Hollywoodish warp of Deaf people and this certainly resonated with me as I viewed the TV ad.

All the positive buzz about American Sign Language generated by Pepsi’s recent SuperBowl Ad were magnified by numerous Deaf ASL vloggers. I have no doubt that, with all the pre-SuperBowl viral attention and the fact that the ad would be shown to the largest audience on TV, the alarms were going off like crazy inside the public relations at Alexander Graham Bell Association for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing organization. The organization was compelled to respond and try to minimize the impact of the ad. AGBell’s misstep was to fire off a letter to Pepsi complaining about the “myth of all Deaf people using sign language only.”

By taking this course of action, the AGBell organization (or AgBAD as some prefer to call them) makes it clear that they don’t respect American Sign Language as a choice for Deaf people, and that they flat out reject ASL. An short-sighted organization run by a hearing man has no right to make these kind of blank statements about Deaf people.

The Deaf community has always welcomed deaf people who have been raised in an oral environment or have cochlear implants. All that is required is a willingness to meet halfway as one tries to learn sign language from the other who takes the time to teach it. No one has ever complained that learning ASL has deprived them of anything nor have they not been enriched by the experience of learning ASL.  What more natural language is there than the visual language of ASL for the people who can listen with their eyes, not their ears?

Some credit goes to the ASL vloggers who have generated the additional publicity and pressure to put AGBell on the defensive. With their letter, AgBell has shown their true colors. The organization will not accept ASL as a language for the Deaf. ASL threatens their cash flow and exposes them for what they really stand for: the almighty dollar, not the well-being of Deaf people.

As far as I’m concerned, Jan 31, 2008, a date which will live in infamy, AGBell has declared war on ASL vloggers.

*** update 2/6/08 ***
I forgot a critical factor in my calculation for the total time of VRS calls a month when you have a 5 gigabytes cap on your monthly bandwidth usage.  I didn’t include the 8 bits/byte in the calculation.  Thanks to Greg who corrected me in a comment below.  This changes the picture significantly.  Instead of 3.5 hours worth of VRS calls a month, it will be 29 hours worth of VRS calls a month (at a rate of 384kbps up/down).

That is about 7 hours of VRS calls a week.  This may be an overkill for many people but I could see how this can easily be exceeded by other callers.
*** end update ***

Lately, I’ve been keeping an eye on the telecommunications industry, especially when it’ll impact the Internet usage at home for Deaf people, like myself. 

Time Warner is starting a test trial in Beaumont, Texas where they will be putting a monthly limit on how much Internet bandwidth a customer can use at home.  If the trial test is successful and they decide to change their policy for the rest of the customers, it will not bode well for their Deaf customers who depend on VRS (Video Relay Service) to make their phone calls.  All of sudden, it gets a lot more expensive for Deaf people to have internet at home.

The cap will start at 5 gigabytes for basic services and you’ll pay more for 10, 20 or 40 gigabytes a month.  How bad is this for the Deaf who make VRS calls?  At only 5 gigabytes/month that is equivalent to only 3.5 hours of VRS call a month!!  29 hours a month. And that doesn’t even include your other Internet activities such as watching vlogs, e-mail, reading news, or checking weather, etc.

Internet service providers such as Time Warner, Comcast and others need to realize that Deaf people will have a much higher non-frivolous utilization of Internet than hearing people.  Our quality of life greatly depends upon having plenty of bandwidth for making VRS calls and these companies should be highly aware of this fact.  I strongly believe that ISPs should exempt the Deaf from these caps if we were able to supply an audiological proof or the like.

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DeafRead is practically a self-run system (with some help to nudge it forward) composed of a collective of Deaf v/bloggers from across the entire spectrum of Deafhood.  This nascent system has started to crystallize and take on specific characteristics that are unique to the online Deaf community and her culture.

While it’s interesting to see how the low degree of separation between the v/bloggers has an impact on the on-going dialog and debates, one thing has caught my eye:  this exclusively online community has grown to a point where it attracts other elements also seen in the larger world of Internet, but with an uniquely Deaf twist.

We now have our first resident Deaf blog spammer who is aggressively promoting a subscribers based website: DeafRomance, which can be seen in the comments of many Deaf v/blogs.  While I detest spam in any form, I thought that the emerging spammer was an interesting, albeit reluctantly logical outcome of this evolving online system inclined towards a specific set of characteristics.  I guess the motivation to aggressively market and hoard the almighty dollar is not lost upon the Deaf :-)

This collective of Deaf v/bloggers may yield many research topics for the aspiring student majoring in cultural anthropology.  Any takers out there?

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