blaqsmith

Location: USA

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: 10+ year gaming generalist focused on gameplay, systems, and UI using Unity, C#

Résumé/CV: https://www.blaqsmith.com/

Email: john at root url used for resume site

If you find that significantly expanding the retention limit doesn't fit within the current pricing structure (as I expect it wouldn't given how competitively priced Backblaze is), consider offering it as an add-on feature, as Dropbox does with Extended Version History (+$40/yr for 1-year retention of deleted files).

I highly suspect the negativity of this article and the comments attached to it are unwarranted. The ADAs goal here (or at least, its original goal) is not to force Netflix to create captions for things that do not have them, but to maintain accessibility for a certain class of entertainment that is already required to be accessible when it's not on the Internet. This means tv shows and movies, things that already have captions offline -- this sort of entertainment should be required to maintain their accessibility when moved online.

If this sort of law is not put in place now, then the deaf will be increasingly pushed out of access to the entertainment for which they have already had to fight pretty hard.

One difference (relevant to me, at least) is that Google Voice does not yet support MMS messages.

The deaf community has been nothing short of begging Netflix to add captions for over 5 years now, and have essentially been ignored the entire time. The usual excuse was that it was technically impossible to add the captions (bs, really).

In the last year or so they've made slight motions towards implementing ~some~ captions, but have done a very bad job of it. Most shows would just have random episodes captioned. So you start a new show, then a few episodes into the season realize you couldn't keep watching them in order because the next few episodes were uncaptioned. To say that this is frustrating, especially for an arc based show like Lost (which was their flagship example of "we are captioning for you!" for the longest time) is an understatement.

This lawsuit is essentially the deaf community having reached a boiling point. These were patient people who tried for the longest time to get Netflix to act like a decent company, and it just didn't happen. It's rather sad that without this lawsuit, they probably never would.

I am deaf, use hearing aids, and know only enough ASL to get in trouble. For socializing in groups I can't help much (I'm still trying to figure that one out), but for taking questions at conferences or presentations, you should consider CART. For phone calls, if you want to avoid the coldness of Relay, consider the VCO variation.

Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is what I used sporadically throughout college to understand those professors with a particularly heavy accent, and consists of a person in the audience typing out the audience questions on a laptop or transcribing machine. You hold a pager-like device which the typing is transmitted to. There's a slight delay while they type, but I found CART transcribers on a whole to be quite a bit better than Relay transcribers, in terms of speed. The downside is that it is expensive, $100-$200/hr here in the States, so it's only viable for important presentations. I was lucky in that my university had an accessibility program and covered this expense for me.

For phone calls (not so much busy conference calls, too slow), IF you are confident in your speaking voice and want to be able to convey the emotions behind your words, see if you have Voice Carry Over (VCO) available to you. This variation on relay is a 3-way call between you and the person you want to talk to, with the relay operator on the line as a non-speaking party. They will type the speech of the other party out for you, and you can speak for yourself.

Based on dlytle's description, he's likely talking about the Dresden Files series.