Barriers to Employment: The Deaf Multimedia Authoring Tax

TL;DR

This paper discusses the significant barriers faced by deaf and hard of hearing individuals in creating accessible multimedia content, which impacts employment opportunities and requires additional resources, highlighting the need for solutions.

Contribution

It introduces the concept of the 'deaf content creation tax' and provides real-world examples and recommendations to address these accessibility challenges.

Findings

Deaf content creation incurs additional time and resource costs.

Barriers affect all employment stages from recruiting to job duties.

Guidance and recommendations can mitigate these challenges.

Abstract

This paper describes the challenges that deaf and hard of hearing people face with creating accessible multimedia content, such as portfolios, instructional videos and video presentations. Unlike content consumption, the process of content creation itself remains highly inaccessible, creating barriers to employment in all stages of recruiting, hiring, and carrying out assigned job duties. Overcoming these barriers incurs a "deaf content creation tax" that translates into requiring significant additional time and resources to produce content equivalent to what a non-disabled person would produce. We highlight this process and associated challenges through real-world examples experienced by the authors, and provide guidance and recommendations for addressing them.