Sorenson, shame on you!
Shame on you!
The provincial government of British Columbia, shame on you!
Shame on you!
The federal government of Canada, shame on you!
Shame on you!
Some of you may have heard by now, Sorenson set up a VRS (Video Relay Service) call centre in Burnaby, British Columbia. It is a province right above the state of Washington. Some of you may think that's a great thing. Well, it's not. It's already causing problems for the deaf communities in British Columbia. You see, Sorenson is not supported by either governments of B.C. (British Columbia) or Canada. That means we cannot use their services. Basically, it is okay for them to lure our interpreters away and cause a critical shortage, which they already have caused in several places across the USA.
You can read the article at The Vancouver Sun, just click here to read the article.
I first learned of this news in the Yahoo! Live chatroom by someone living in B.C. She was outraged over the story and I don't blame her one bit. I was outraged too when I learned of the news. It's hard to believe that we are already being negatively affected by the VRS and we don't even have a dedicated VRS provider in Canada. This shouldn't have been allowed to happen in the first place because of how it would affect our deaf communities.
It is already affecting them; they are now being forced to reserve an interpreter weeks in advance even for a simple doctor appointment or a job interview. So if you were called in for a job interview, which is to take place in two days, you are out of luck. I would like to know how this affects a life and death situation at a hospital. I certainly hope no one had to be denied an interpreter at a hospital due to the shortage in B.C. yet. That would be just terrible.
Money talks. The interpreters living in Canada will benefit from working for Sorenson because of the lucrative salaries along with attractive benefits.
The interpreters probably knew and were told that the deaf Canadians would not be able to use the VRS provided by Sorenson. It would be too easy to point fingers at the interpreters for abandoning the deaf communities in British Columbia. I don't hold anything against them; they are only trying to make a good living. We can't just sit here and say that everybody should have principles to stick to; you know it will not happen.
If you were offered a hefty salary with amazing benefits, would you turn it down? If you said yes, so did a lot of interpreters. If I were an interpreter, I probably would have accepted the job. Like I said, money talks.
In case some of my readers are unfamiliar with what a VRS is. It is called video relay service. You may be familiar with relay services provided by phone companies, if you aren't. Well, I will just boil it down to a simple explanation. A relay service provides you a third-party person to relay your messages to the person on the other side and do the same the other way around.
Video relay service is somewhat new when compared to text relay, which has been around for many years. The video relay services started to creep in at the crack of 21st century. Today, they are much, much more common and are a growing industry. Not only to mention the incentives they receive from the government for providing video and text relay services.
Earlier, I mentioned that we don't have a VRS provider in Canada. We are able to use a couple VRS, but they are not in Canada. So what happens is that when you call some 800 toll-free phone numbers, they will be directed to the places assigned with these numbers in the USA instead of Canada. That is something not a lot of people is aware of. I wouldn't be surprised if the VRS providers didn't know either.
If we were to set up a Canadian VRS provider, the real challenge is to get more interpreters to join the service because a large number of them are or will be already employed by Sorenson and possibly other video relay services. In fact, the person I spoke to at Yahoo! Live said that one of the solutions would for the government or a major telecom to share services with Sorenson and other VRS providers. This way, both Americans and Canadians will be able to gain access to the same services.
There are probably more ideas that some people may have tossed around. There are solutions and we need them as soon as possible because we don't want every province to be affected by the time we come up with a solution.
VITAC, a leader in closed captioning in America recently launched a new campaign to heighten awareness of the impact of captions have on many people. It is called CaptionsON. Below is what they had to say on the subject of why captions matter.
Captions matter because captions are…Below are the findings in a market research. An analyst group called Decision Analyst, Inc conducted the survey in February 2008. I cannot say I am surprised about some of these findings. There is a lot of bad captioning on TV, especially in real-time. CNN, Fox News and more real-time networks are often below acceptable standards when it comes to the quality of captioning. You should see some of the errors they make on CNN. When they were covering the death of Charlton Heston, the captioning indicated that he had Always Ear Disease. It should have been Alzheimer's disease.Source: CaptionsON.com
- Free to viewers of television and the Internet.
- Accessible to individuals living in nearly every household in the United States.
- Professionally produced in the US by highly skilled stenographers and offline captioners. Stenographers transcribe the audio portion of a live program as it is being aired and send the captions across the country in seconds. Offline captioners transcribe prerecorded programming with 100% accuracy before it airs.
- An essential service for the over 31 million individuals who are deaf or hard of hearing, giving them access to the audio portion of programming on TV and the Internet.
- A tool that improves reading and listening skills of children and adults by visually tying words with sound.
- A way to strengthen language and comprehension skills for those learning English as a second language, marrying the spoken word with the written word as well as reinforcing grammar and sentence structure.
- A great way to engage and exercise the mind by challenging the viewer to focus on reading, listening and comprehending in real time
- Able to enhance family time by not only allowing all members of the household to enjoy programming at lower volume levels but also knowing the added benefits captions are bringing to everyone – regardless of age.
Key Findings:It's a great thing that VITAC is doing. The more awareness they spread, the better it will be for us. By the way, to visit the CaptionsOn website, just click here.Source: CaptionsON.com
- Eight in ten TV viewers have been exposed to captions.
- 50% of those exposed to captions proactively turn captions on some percent of their viewing time.
- Less than 1/5 of them have seen captions online (17%).
- Less than 1/3 of them report having seen captions in TV advertising (31%).
- 70% of those who never use captions said they would turn on captions if they knew about all the benefits of captions. Among those who are under 45 the percentage jumps to 81%.
- But unfortunately 47% of those who responded, when asked if they were unhappy with the quality of captions, said “yes.” And 45% of that group said that they change the channel/turn the program off when they are unhappy with the captions.
