Awaiting Quality Captions
James Rath is a legally blind filmmaker. Born with non-correctable conditions Ocular Albinism and Nystagmus. He became passionate about filmmaking at a young age when he was able to see clearer through a viewfinder of a camera. His film work has been featured on CNN, Huffington Post, Aplus, iClarified, Mac Stories, and shared by Apple’s CEO Tim Cook to his 2 million Twitter followers. He actively makes films about accessibility, mental health, relationships, technology, and events in his life, then sharing them on YouTube.
As an online video creator who actively uses technology, and often requires accessibility, it’s become a topic of interest with the videos I create. Not only do I want to express advocacy for accessibility but I want to have a platform where my content can be accessible to everyone, deaf, blind, able-bodied, etc. My primary platform is YouTube which has done strives to provide closed captioning tools for creators to successfully and easily create cc’s for their videos but hasn’t publicly expressed interested in supporting the blind with the inclusion of audio descriptions. With 285 Million visually impaired and blind in the world, it’s important to have mainstream video content online accessible to grow audiences, SEO, perspectives, and allow for more unique voices to independently broadcast themselves.
Follow James on Twitter!