At-Large Workspace: Enhancing Accountability - Recommendations for Diversity

I very much agree with this statement. Because it is not possible to cater for the wide diversity of languages, at least ensuring that the working language of ICANN is in English that can be understood by people who are not fluent English speakers is important.  

Also in support of Judith's comment, captioning would also help non-fluent-English speakers to at least follow along with what the speaker is saying - if the captioner captures the words correctly.

I sent this in to the Yrjo, Bastiaan, Sebastien, and others on December 4 but somehow it did not get incorporated. I have incorporated Beran's comments and emphasis into these comments I am leaving.

My comment is that we in At Large have put much money onto language support, but I think we need to put equal money into captioning so we can get more people engaged. Captioning helps people whose native language is not English, for people with low bandwidth, and for people with disabilities. People with low bandwidth have trouble engaging in calls and it affects everything they do. This is in the recommendations but I think we could mention that we hope this will be adopted and that ICANN should be funding captioning for all instead of just transcripts at a much later date.

Only the GAC has language support and they also have live captioning which we do not. MSSI also have live captioning on all their calls after I had suggested it and demoed it on one of their calls.  We should all be able to have this and I think all constituencies should have this option. WE also need to figure out how to change the culture in ICANN as regards captioning.  While in At large we have language support but in additional to language support we should have live captioning for all meetings. We should also make every effort to welcome people with disabilities into the sessions. ICANN is very late to the game. Many of their videos are not captioned making it hard for people with impairments to use them. Hopefully the new ICANN learn platform will be more accessible but many of the videos are not captioned, especially the older ones

I agree with the statement. I'd like to add that we should not see language as a substitute for communication itself (in this case, the need to communicate to a diverse community on its activities). The need is for communication, and language is an instrument for this communication.

If communication to a diverse community is the objective, then we also need to examine ways by which communication can happen (in addition to language translations). Infographics, animations, videos that are language-neutral (or which can be 'localized' by communities in their own cultural contexts, perhaps using automatic translation tools or voice overs or subtitles) could be one way, but there are probably others too.