Last week, President Obama held a Facebook Town Hall event via live video-streaming to promote the StartUP America Partnership, which was followed by a panel discussion by start-up veterans. As an entrepreneur and a fan of this initiative, I “tuned in” to this live video stream to learn more about the program and learn from the panelists. Except…there was one road-block.

Road-Block: Lack of Captions at the Live Event

The live video feed wasn’t captioned. Now, I’m not here to whine or point fingers, but to tell you about an interesting accessibility “alternative” that I stumbled upon. This “solution” was instantly available, didn’t cost me a dime, AND allowed me to understand the main points — want to take a guess at what that “solution” was?

Twitter.

For those of you who are still on the fence about Twitter, let me assure you that it is not always full of self-promoters or useless babble. When Twitter is “done right” it is a powerful tool for people to tell you what’s going on — in a “little d democratic” kind of way. These 140-character statements challenge one to be tactful in how they write, to be understood, interpreted, and actionable. Effectively, the character limit forces one to cut through the fluff to get to the point. For a deaf person like me, Twitter is really helpful. It’s kind of a digital version of my friend who sat next to me at lunch in middle school, who I would (often) turn to and ask, “Hey, what’s everyone laughing about?” That person–bless her heart–would re-iterate the joke for me concisely and quickly, and of course, I would then laugh when everyone else had stopped laughing.

Using Twitter as a “Detour”

When I sat there with the live video-feed playing, bummed out that I couldn’t follow along, I quickly realized that this was a pretty well-attended event both online and in Palo Alto, CA, and that people were more than likely going to be talking about it on Twitter. With my deaf-centric network, I knew I’d have a lot of “friends” who will be paraphrasing what is being said at the Town Hall. So I opened up Twitter, and observed that the “hashtag” to follow was #startupamerica & #fblive. Hashtags are helpful because it allows you to follow and receive tweets about specific topics — some are event-specific, like “#RoyalWedding” or subject-focused such as #tech. You can also follow a reliable individual or organization on Twitter that seems to tweet out well-timed, clear info and quotes.

@StartupAmerica & #fblive #startupamerica

In this case, I found that @StartUpAmerica had the most relevant, accurate Tweets about this Town Hall event, and created a stream to only see their tweets.  See the image to see what I mean, and the quality of the content.

Before I knew it, I was understanding what was going on at that Town Hall.

I became a participant.

I ended up following the Twitter feed with the video on the side. It was my instantly available, free, paraphrasing-friend-turned-accessibility tool. It helped me right there and then.

I’m NOT advocating that Twitter is a substitute for captioning for live events OR live video streams. (Equal access to communication is really important, and it’s not just deaf and hard of hearing who would benefit — aging Americans, people whose primary language is not English, kids who are learning to read..) But Twitter provided me with access to information when it was not made available otherwise, and that’s valuable too. Now… just imagine if you could combine the participatory nature of Twitter with accessibility features like universal captioning. Hmmm… don’t mind if I do.

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