Scoble points out one of the scaling issues with accessibility laws: ironically, they favor the big players:

Now, imagine a world where every video is forced to get a transcript so that it’s accessible to blind people? Yeah, some sites like mine would just pay to have transcripts done. But most video bloggers can’t afford that. So who would pay for this?

Take the podcasts we do here on Industry Misinterpretations - say I had to provide a transcript for those. I looked into that once, and - while the price wasn't onerous for a corporate site, I can definitely see questions coming up at budget time. For larger companies, providing a transcript would be a pain, but a small one. For smaller outfits, it could easily be a back breaker.

I have sympathy for the blind (or deaf, etc) who want access to the same things the rest of us have access to - but at the same time, Scoble's "who pays for that?" question is not coming from a place of harshness. It's a real problem for smaller players with limited budgets.

There's also a gap between the reasonable accessibility steps (alt text, etc) that help screen readers, and the reality of increasingly less accessible video technologies. Let me use a simple example: Smalltalk Daily. Those are narrated screencasts, where I do demonstrations of how Cincom Smalltalk works. If you can't see it, there is audio - but how useful is it? There's definitely a "lost in translation" thing there, IMHO. The same would apply to a lot of video, even if a transcript were provided. Not everything online can be reduced to an interview.

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