To Mr. Jobs,
I read your letter the other day with excitement, then concern, and finally disgust. I felt the need to write this open letter to the community and to you to explain why.
Mr. Jobs, I've loved Apple and its products for years. They're the best computers available in America. But right now your company is excluding several million Americans by your decision not to work with Adobe and its Flash products: deaf and hard of hearing Americans. I read your letter with excitement, hoping you'd have an alternative. But you don't, and this illegal, immoral exclusion disgusts me. Your products aren't captioned or accessible, and if you can't come up with a better alternative, I think you should go ahead, work with Adobe, and support the Flash video format.
Look, I think I know what you're doing, because I'm an artist and writer. I think you want to create beautiful technology that's extremely tight and doesn't have bugs. That's WHY I buy Apple products-I've never had a virus on one! But when you exclude an entire population with no end in sight, I begin to take serious issue.
Let's look at the software. Last time I checked, your iTunes products carried 241 captioned films. That might seem like a lot, but it's a drop in the bucket for you; if you include tv shows, iTunes University and various podcasts and music videos, you have several hundred thousand videos running. And only 241 are captioned or subtitled. So you're certainly not doing it with your own software.
This is bearable on a computer, where at least your Mac OSX supports Flash and we can get video from other sources. But that brings me to hardware. I'm typing on an iPad right now, and I love it. But none of the videos are captioned, not even the YouTube videos you have a special app for. The same is true for the iPhone. Do you have any idea how many Deaf and hard of hearing kids use both? We need accessibility, and so far, flash is it, whether it's video on Hulu, Netflix, ABC, CNN, NPR.... Not to mention YouTube, which can't even show it's autocaptions on an iPhone or iPad!
Yeah, I know there's software issues. I also know that Deaf Americans have a legal right to reasonable access which you're tacitly ignoring even as you provide services and corporate lawyers niggle at which kind of technology is covered by law. I know there's millions of signing, hearing aid using, cochlear implant wearing people who benefit from subtitles or captions, and millions more who use them to learn English, watch films in noisy places, or respect their sleeping partners. Captions and subtitles aren't just about accessibility: they're an American way of life. And honestly, I don't think it can be that much of a problem. People who jailbreak their iPads wave them around showing off Flash, and it looks better than you claim.
Right now, there's a bill making its way-HR 3101-which purports to protect accessibility in telecommunications, but people are already telling me how American companies are preparing to avoid the law and their moral responsibility to provide access for all Americans by claiming various new technologies aren't covered and don't need to provide access. This isn't just disgusting, but short-sighted, and making me worry that this is the last Apple product I'll be able to ethically let myself buy, especially with upcoming smartphones from other companies which ARE able to provide the access I need on the horizon.
Yours truly,