I personally was there and could not believe my eyes. Apple sent someone to talk to us for 30 minutes about accessibility for blind people and yet could not answer any questions about our needs??

Also, there are issues with iTunes captioning.

There was a post on this site dated August 7, 2008 saying that there are 94 captioned movies on iTunes. Then post dated on March 31, 2009 said there were 122 captioned movies. Last month I personally (December 2009) saw only 180 captioned movies. Out of thousands of videos?? What’s up with that?

Not just that, only captioned movies can be found via Power Search – captioned TV shows cannot be searched! How are we supposed to find them? I would suggest that iTunes add the “CC” link on top navigation so it would go to a page with all captioned contents listed for each category (movies, shows, etc.)

Unless I missed other captioned media or features, please let me know.

Someone told me that Apple claimed all of their movies are captioned, all we need to do is to turn on by choosing Control > Audio & Subtitles > Show Closed Captions. I do see this in iTunes, but they are greyed out. They also said that I “might be confused” because only movies with “SCC” captions have the little CC icon in iTunes listing, and others have open captions or closed QTText captions, and these don’t get the CC icon. I have no idea what those abbreviations mean or whether they all work. I will inquiry at Apple further. Meanwhile, does anyone know about this feature and if it is true that all movies on iTunes are captioned?

@Jaime: Did Apple say anything significant during your phone call to them? What issues were discussed?

@Colin: I wonder the same thing about voice recognition. iPhone has an app from Nuance (there’s another post about it on this site), but not everyone owns iPhone, including myself (I use Blackberry). It would be nice to have that same thing for BB and for Mac OS X. By the way, Apple already included screen reader for blind users in Snow Leopard and yet hasn’t thought of installing a voice recognition for us? I know voice recognition is not great, but it is something they could start with and then eventually upgrade. It looks to me that Apple is too focused on accessibility issues for blind users, and that incident described above is one example.

I am going to write to Apple, too. However, I feel that the accessibility issues for deaf and hard of hearing users would finally get resolved by Apple if a group letter is sent to them with major issues finalized from a collective feedback within a group. It would look more organized and more powerful than feedback from individual users. What do you think?

You can call Ruth at (408) 862-3314. (Apple CEO Steve Job’s executive office) Steve is open-ear to listen your feedback.

I will be posting this at that link and the more that have the same problems or desires the quicker it will be looked at!

Cheers,
Grant

Merci beaucoup.

shirley k, yrey

Great site by the way! Slick layout! Actually, this is slight different topic (but same feedback). I just sent the feedback to apple iTunes regarding to add closed caption symbol and rating (if they want to). I created two mockup layouts to see what it looks like. If you know anyone that work inside apple, please show them those two links: http://www.twitpic.com/itpbb and http://www.twitpic.com/itobd

You’ll see closed caption and rating system in white symbol. Thanks!