"If you misrepresent what's in this plan, we will call you out." So said President Barack Obama in a speech on health care some years ago. "Know this," he said. "I won't stand by while the special interests use the same old tactics to keep things exactly as they are. If you misrepresent what's in this plan, we will call you out. And I will not -- I WILL NOT -- accept the status quo as a solution. Not this time. Not now."
It was important at that time that simply maintaining the existing state of affairs was not acceptable. Efforts to move forward met with misrepresentations ... lies ... would not be tolerated in an effort to move forward. Somehow, reading those words made me think about quality in our profession, especially on the CART/captioning side, and the thousands of hearing-impaired persons who depend on us as their ears for their window on the world. The status quo ... doing things a certain way because that's the way we've always done things ... has left hearing-impaired people marginalized, cast off to the side with condescension, their best interests determined more often by what's best for someone's pocketbook than what's best to serve the person with a hearing-related disability. Often, hearing-impaired persons are not ever asked if the ADA accommodation chosen for them is actually helping them. Rarely are they asked if the services are of good enough quality to even be helpful. Those times where hearing-impaired persons dare to complain about services, they're told they should be grateful for whatever they're offered in the way of accommodation, accommodating or not. Because they feel they are being forced to spend money on ADA accommodation unnecessarily, organizations reluctantly provide it but go to great lengths to find the cheapest solution, not the best.
This means late-deafened adults may receive American Sign Language interpreting even when their hearing loss is so sudden that they do not know ASL. This means hearing-impaired viewers are left in the dark when television stations use cheap, low-quality computer software programs instead of competent broadcast captioners to caption TV. This means hearing-impaired students are impaired even further when they're offered notetakers throwing disjointed concepts at them instead of the full accomodation afforded by a qualified CART provider. If studenst could "get by" with a concepts-based summary of a class, why have an instructor, who's being paid to share all of their knowledge with all of the class. When universities pay their instructors for their knowledge and teaching skills, don't they expect that brilliant knowledge to be passed along, in full, to every student? And when that tuition check is written, is that for a full education or a summarized one?
Low-ball contracting practices, corporatization, and commoditization affect the reporting profession in very negative ways. But unskilled, unqualified providers and the fly-by-night agencies they work for do more damage to the reporting profession than any amount of low-ball contracting or those embarrassing incentive gift-giving practices. And who suffers most from this lack of quality? It's the client, the end-user, the CART consumer, the person dependent upon broadcast captioning. Someone in your family depends on it!
Providing effective CART or broadcast captioning requires trained, skilled, excellent providers. Near perfection, in my opinion. Anything less is a violation of the requirement of the Americans With Disabilities Act ... a violation of the very law that was enacted to protect the hearing-impaired consumer from being taken advantage of. I never want to see that happen. The hearing-impaired have been marginalized for too long.
Many institutions or entities who claim to serve and accommodate the deaf and hard-of-hearing are only too happy to squeak by the way they've always done things ... with The Warm Body Syndrome, or "Anything will do." They sometimes misrepresent what's available to the CART consumer in the way of accommodation, telling them, "This is the best we can do," when what they really mean is, "This is all we're going to pay for." Their first consideration is cost; their last, quality. Members of the disability community are often excluded from the labor force. But how can they compete in the labor force without the full opportunity to achieve the academic success which will enable them to possess the skills and training of everyone else standing in line for the same job?
I am extremely disturbed when methods such as notetakers or TypeWell services are offered as full accommodation for a deaf or hard-of-hearing person, especially in a complex setting. I won't stand for that. Not now, 20 years after the enactment of the Americans With Disabilities Act ... not now, when quality matters more than ever. I won't permit the same old excuses to keep things as they have been for years. When a business or organizations wishes to offer accommodation that is not full accommodation, I will call them out by informing them that there is something better for their CART consumers. I will call them out by demonstrating the superiority of CART over TypeWell notetaking for hearing-impaired students where every word is important. I will point out the high price paid for low cost ... that price paid by the CART consumer. Rest assured, if you are a company that misrepresents, I will call you out.