On Reddit, I spotted a thread that talked about the H3 podcast and how upon requesting captions other members of the audience insisted auto captions were adequate. The podcast itself apparently stated it was too difficult to do the captioning for hours of content.

My audience is mostly stenographers that support good captions on all content. I’ll be preaching to the choir here. The only thing between us and that dream are the greedy corps and individuals that have no problem being rewarded for their success — they’ll take every dime you’ll give — but they have a lot of problems making simple provisions for the disabled.

It’s my position that we need to be firm about this and keep pushing for the expansion of stenographic writers in captioning. No method is perfect, but auto captions and crowdsourcing are failing some of the most vulnerable people in our society. Do we accept that or do we speak out about it?

We need a significant increase in our numbers to be able to cover all the content out there. Hopefully investors see things like this and realize there’s a genuine need for a lot more stenographers. Pump students up with stenographic and business education and set them loose on the market. It’d give this field the tools it needs to fight for the disabled. I believe so strongly in this that I myself might look into school funding.

If anybody from H3 Podcast stumbles across this, your rep is going to take a hit if you keep letting this situation go unresolved. Don’t let it get to that point and just spend the piddly $100 or $200 it would take you to caption your content per hour. If stenographer prices are really a problem for whatever level of revenue you have, you could at the very least turn to transcribers, who are often taken advantage of and underpaid.

How can we spread this message beyond our social circles?