There’s one thing that has always made me disgruntled about online video… the unavailability of captions for the hearing impaired. What astounds me is that, as long as streaming video has been available, content providers either still haven’t found out a way to provide closed captions or just have a complete lack of interest in providing them.
My recent upset over this issue probably stems the recent availability of some of my favorite shows online, which at first made me happy to be able to catch up on episodes I missed this season. Unfortunately, I was largely let down. NBC.com does provide captions, but only for a few shows and the quality of the captions are crappy in general. For reasons that confound me, the captions are displayed off screen and to the side, which makes it pretty difficult to read them without taking your eyes off the screen. And like I said, only a very few shows get them… the show I tuned in for, The Office, gets no captions at all. I suppose hearing impaired people aren’t supposed to be interested in comedy shows?
NBC’s attempts are noble, and better than other online content providers (which from my experience provide no captions at all), but leaves a lot to be desired. With online video expanding more and more (with webisodes, reruns, etc) one can only hope that content providers seek to provide access to those with disabilities rather than bar them from enjoying the same content like everyone else.
This may come as a result of no federal regulations in regards to online video content and closed captions, but hopefully this is a loophole that can be closed pretty soon… there really is no excuse why big television networks cannot provide the same closed captions that they provide in the original on the air broadcasts. 
Edit:
From a blog on deafdc.com Shane Feldman writes about Project ReadOn, an online service that offers to caption any videos for you free of charge. Bravo! 
