I hate news videos.
No, not the ones you see on TV. I’m talking about most of the ones you see online. Mainly on affiliate sites for ABC or CBS and the like. What annoys me the most about these is that most of the time they’re a link on the front page. So you click on the link to find out more about the story. However on the resulting page you find nothing but a video. No text at all.
“What’s so bad about that?” you may ask. Simple. What about the people who
- Don’t have sound or are surfing the web at a time that others are sleeping?
- Are hearing impaired?
I fall into both of these categories. I’m about 3/4 deaf in my right ear and 1/2 deaf in my left. Even with headphones I find I have some problems understand everything. Also there are times when I’m up late surfing and don’t want to disturb my wife.
I know I’m not the only one who gets annoyed by this. Back in the day the video would compliment the story. In those cases I rarely clicked on the videos because everything I needed to know was typed out right next to it. Plus I didn’t feel like waiting for the video to load or to go through advertisments in order to get to the video I want.
CnetTV is a good example of how to handle things if you MUST be video only. While most videos (reviews for instance) have a corresponding article, a lot of the shows have an option for closed captions. It lags ever so slightly and it’s a weird experience, but to someone who watches a lot of close captioned TV, it’s a godsend.
Get it together newspeople. If you link to just a page with video without having some sort of summary, you’re going to piss off a lot of people.
