#WHccNow Campaign Succeeds in Getting Closed Captions on White House Video

Deaf filmmaker and human rights advocate Braam Jordaan recently launched a social media campaign around the hashtag #WHccNow to advocate for the White House to closed caption all their web videos. The tag stands for ‘White House closed caption now,’ and has been trending on Twitter’s accessibility advocate communities.

Although the White House captions videos posted on its website and YouTube channel, videos posted natively on Facebook were not displaying captions. The White House and all federal government agencies must caption videos publicly and internally in accordance with Section 508 accessibility rules.

Braam posted a video on Facebook to announce the campaign to demand captions on social media videos. Watch it here in ASL with English closed captions.

Today Braam tweeted out a grateful victory announcement:



New videos posted on the White House Facebook page offer the closed caption option or have open captions burned into the video. Deaf advocates are celebrating the swift response from the government.

To learn how to add closed captions to Facebook videos, check out this free tutorial: