Interview with President of AGBell

New AGBell President, Jay Wyant, celebrated his swearing-in on June 30 with a guest appearance on the Milwaukee local FOX show "Wake Up Milwaukee." Since Fox 6 news did not provide captioning or a transcript for those in the audience with hearing loss, AGBell provided the captioning themselves. An unfortunate and ironic twist considering that Fox 6 news interviewed a deaf person who is the president of a nationally known organization for deaf and hard of hearing people and parents of children with hearing loss.

Recently, one blogger, RLM, made this wild claim about Jay Wyant before AGBell added captioning in their video link of the Fox 6 news interview:

Why the new AGBell president, Jay Wyant, solely appeared on the Milwaukee WITI FOX News' Health Center segment without someone from the DBC to offer the counter-argument on the ongoing controversy on the educational method and language acquisition and development?

Apparently, if you watch the captioned video by AGBell (note, be sure click on "CC" symbol to turn on the closed captioning), you can easily tell that no arguments were made at all at anytime regarding any topics such as educational method or language acquisition and development. I am hoping that RLM will publicly acknowledge this error of his.

UPDATE: It's a bit ironic considering the lack of captioning or available transcript by Fox 6 news but even more so coming from AGBell's website that linked to that video of the Fox 6 news interview with Jay Wyant who, again more irony here, used to be the Marketing Director for CaptionMax and has extensive in telecommunications and technology accessbility background as described in here. It certainly behooves AGBell to at least offer a transcript of the Fox 6 news even though it was the news station's utlimate responsibility in providing a text version of the interview for those who cannot hear or understand well the spoken word. A transcript should have been provided by AGBell once they thought about linking to a non-captioned Fox 6 news interview of their own president. But it took a hard of hearing person, me, to do all this wokr just so the rest of ya'll can have that equal access. Yet it took several hours to get all this prepared by listening and writing down the words and putting them into captioned form along with a transcript. Yet, I'm not going use laziness or the "purity" route as an excuse not to provide captioning or a transcript when many of you know you can do it anyway but don't. You are what you do.

Jay Wyant, are you listening to what I'm saying?

Great interview, though.

UPDATE II: I removed the YouTube video of my captioning effort and transcript from my blog since AGBell now has their captioned video of the interview. Of course, done by CaptionMax. Good for them. And I wonder why it took them so long? Yet I was about 98 to 98% accurate despite Jay's voice, which is still very intelligible. And I commend him for speaking and using his voice in front of a camera. That takes courage and shows full confidence in his ability to speak and have a dialogue.