Will the Colt’s Peyton Manning get the monkey off his back and lead his team to victory? Will the Bear’s Rex Grossman get a 0.0 or 100.0 passer rating and endure year-long criticism or enjoy a trip to Disneyworld? Amid the excitement about the Super Bowl this weekend, deaf and hard of hearing people were on the losing end of a new NFL initiative to allow the public to select this year’s Super Bowl advertisement for the NFL.
Of course, for most of the American public, the advertisements are a bigger draw than the game itself. We’ve heard many in the deaf and hard of hearing community complain for years about the lack of captioning of million-dollar per half-a-minute Super Bowl advertisements. Now the NFL joins in on this despicable neglect.
The NFL showed video clips of 12 pitches for a new NFL Super Bowl ad (#5 won the competition). The vote is now closed; however, none of the videos, which are still on the website, are captioned despite a pitch made by Vanessa (#12) focusing on a deaf boy. A hearing friend provided a description of what Vanessa said:
The last one (#12) is by Vanessa. She describes a child (Timmy) sitting in front of a TV in the family room watching the NFL network with closed captions and tossing a football from hand-to-hand. The family is getting ready to go to the Super Bowl. Mom taps the child on the shoulder and says, “Timmy let’s go,” and motions for him to come.
Next shot is inside the Super Bowl stadium and the teams rush out onto the field. The crowd goes wild, except for the little boy who sits quietly. The camera pans the crowd full of jumping, screaming fans, but, from the little boy’s point of view, there is no sound. The camera focuses on the child. Timmy closes his eyes and puts his hands on the bleachers.
We see the vibrations through his shaking hands. Timmy feels the crowd (ostensibly from the noise/commotion being made by the crowd). He smiles.
Then you see deaf former NFL player Kenny Walker and Tennessee Titan’s head coach Jeff Fisher. They use sign language (the woman signed “feel game”) as we read, “Feel the game.”
Not only does the NFL turn away 30 million deaf and hard of hearing Americans by not captioning its web videos, they are exploiting the emotional (and perhaps marketing) impact of the same group of people that they deny access to. In this case, they are featuring a deaf boy and former deaf NFL player who wouldn’t be able to understand the video if it was shown to them.
The NFL is guilty for more than not captioning their web videos. I watched an NFL Network show in December where NFL Films honcho, Steve Sabol, interviewed Denver Broncos wide receiver, Rod Smith, about his long and illustrious career. Unfortunately it was not captioned. During the NFC and AFC championship games I saw an advertisement for the NFL Network that was also not captioned. There is a clear lack of effort by the NFL to caption its web videos, shows, and advertisements.
Send an email to the NFL at http://www.nfl.com/help/emailtech and ask them to caption all 12 ad pitches on their website and to caption the ad that they will show during the SuperBowl (which is web video #5 and we have no idea what it is about).
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I emailed them. Thanks for the link, Shane!
Ditto! Let’s all 30 million of us clog their bandwidth with emails. Show them that deaf and hard of hearing television viewers not only have clout we also have a voice, er, sign.
Done. I said this:
“Hello,
I am a deaf person, and I am disturbed by the fact that NFL, sponsored by United Way is not being accessible to its deaf fans. None of your videos on the website are captioned, and one in particular has a deaf person in it!
Please caption all of your videos on the website from now on. You will get more viewers that way, since there are 30 million of us deaf in the United States. It’s a win/win situation.
Thank you.”
Hopefully if enough of us do this, they’ll do something. :P
NFL,
You’ve got email!
Done! Thanks for bring it up :)
I wonder, as devil’s advocate, whether the NFL has realized that deaf people do a whole lot of demanding for access, but failrly little in the way of contributing to their bottom line? Of 30 million deaf and hard of hearing, how many are sports fans. Of that, how many give a whit about the NFL? And…how many are AVID enough to actually attend games, buy merchandise and write fan letters? Yes, communication should be something we should take for granted in this day in age (another way of saying that society should have gotten with the program a long time ago.) However, look at it from a business perspective. How much are you willing to bet that deaf are tightwads that demand much and give little? Ouch? Just look at NAD, AADB, and other advocacy organizations that could be doing so much more if people opened up their wallets. If deaf barely give to organizations that directly benefit them, can they be counted on to give to commercial enterprises just because a commercial is captioned?
Then again, have you thought about adding alternative text on this site for you blind counterparts… talk about inaccessible information.