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Two angry red cartoon devil's with wings are pointing at a caption that says, 'caption this'
Caption this
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WHY IS ACCESSIBILITY ALWAYS LEFT TO THOSE THAT DON’T HAVE THE ENERGY TO DO IT???

If you haven’t been watching my stories you won’t yet of seen caption gate. While making my first IGTV video I came up against issues that those from the disabled community always face. Access it seems is something only we care about and massive companies couldn’t give a flying fuck which means that all the labor falls on people who really don’t have the energy for it. 

I spent an entire day and all my energy on trying to caption a 5 min video. I spent lots of money on apps that either only let me do one minute (here’s looking at you Cliptomatic, didn’t say that before I paid did you!) or that made utter gibberish and then crashed when I tried to change it. 

I scoured the internet for guides and basically everything told me to pay money just to make my content accessible and it wasn’t chump change either. Finally through sheer trial and error I managed to crack the code but it involved me getting a transcript from Otter.ai, downloading it as a SRT file and then uploading that and the video to Kapwing. Even then I couldn’t change the size or position of the text. 

It’s appalling how much this labor is just left to us. You have massive brands banging on about how they are inclusive but basic needs are not met and we are left to pick up the pieces and it’s really not good enough.

I shouldn’t have to be shouting from the roof tops that I finally found a solution to our issue. It should be something that is already in built to the app and I am tired of it. 

The labor cannot always fall on us to educate and make change. I feel like the world is slowly catching up with this but in the mean time it leaves us both exhausted and frustrated at the end of the day it’s just not fair.