You want to talk about subtitles, I have a story about something that pissed me off.
I have a lot harder time learning stuff from videos compared to being able to read it. Video is fine if it's entertaining stuff and it doesn't matter if I forget a few things, but if it's supposed to be important and I HAVE to remember it, video is less than ideal. This stuff all counts as a learning disability. Legally, I'm disabled. This means that employers are obligated to make good-faith efforts to provide reasonable accommodations.
It's a requirement for tech companies that handle personal data to make their employees take classes on how to handle data securely. It's basically the law -- if you don't do that, and there's a security breach, there are fines and legal damages. But at one of the companies I worked for, the required class was not only a video class... the video was NON-SEEKABLE. One-way. Can't rewind. Can't fast-forward. If you miss something, the only option is to start over.
I complained about this, asking for accommodation for my learning disability.
... they turned on the subtitles.
Bloody heck, that made me mad. That didn't solve the problem at all. I'm not DEAF. The problem isn't that I have to see the words to process them. It's that I have to be able to process them at my own pace. But that was all they could do. No written alternative available.
I muscled through it. I tried to pay attention, specifically looking for stuff that was surprising so I could take notes. Fortunately, I had read up on this stuff in the past for a different job, so it wasn't too terribly different from what I already knew. But it still was really upsetting that a company dedicated to making educational material would make such a RIDICULOUS system.
They told me that they had to have a way to verify that people actually consumed the material in order to be allowed to give certifications, and the only way they could do it reliably was to make the video to where you couldn't just skip it... but that just feels like an excuse, because there are plenty of other ways to do it.
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