Science & Tech Quote by Joe Clark

You can hear the exhaustion of someone who’s watched accessibility get treated like an optional add-on, then blamed on the people who need it. Clark’s target isn’t just “authoring tools” in the abstract; it’s a whole production pipeline that pretends captions are a simple export setting when they’re actually craft, labor, and standards compliance. The jab lands because it’s specific: not “software is bad,” but “almost no software” can create captions that reliably work in real media players. That’s an indictment of interoperability and priorities, not ingenuity.

The subtext is institutional, not technical. “And of course there is no training” is doing heavy lifting: caption quality isn’t failing because people are lazy; it’s failing because organizations won’t fund expertise, curricula, or time. Clark frames the situation as predictable, almost inevitable, because the system keeps choosing speed and polish for the fully-hearing audience while treating deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers as edge cases.

The comparison to TV captioning is strategically cruel. Broadcast captions have long been criticized for errors, lag, and omissions, but at least they exist within regulated frameworks and mature workflows. Saying “this stuff is generally worse” suggests the digital era didn’t democratize access; it decentralized responsibility. When everyone can publish video, no one is accountable for caption integrity. Clark’s bluntness reads less like pessimism than triage: if tools and training don’t exist, “choice” becomes a fig leaf for exclusion.