Anyone who says deafness is a silent epidemic hasn’t heard Sean Forbes. 

The 35-year-old American hip-hop artist has been inspiring a generation of hearing, hard-of-hearing and Deaf individuals for years, as a musician who continues to break ground and stereotypes with his beats.  

With his newly-released single, “Two Blown Speakers,”  Forbes is proving his hearing loss won’t stand in the way of his passions. 

Captioning on YouTube has been a hot topic in the deaf/Hard of Hearing world lately, especially among teenagers. YouTuber Rikki Poynter – Pikachu lover and advocate for closed captioning, who’s also deaf – has sort of led the charge for getting all YouTube videos captioned. She explains in her video why captioning is important for Deaf/HOH people, as well as those who don’t speak the language that the video is filmed  in. She also posts a whole load about deaf related topics.

Captions on YouTube has been such an important topic lately, mostly because they are so bad. In 2009, YouTube released their automatic captioning feature for videos using voice recognition algorithm, but the text is often inaccurate. While YouTube does let users upload their own captions, it can be time consuming, and most users don’t do it. However, with encouragement from the Deaf/Hard of Hearing community, and people like Rikki, there are some YouTubers who are leading this change. Here’s a list of some YouTubers I’ve found who caption their videos: