Hey Monzo Community!
Tomorrow (16 May) is Global Accessibility Awareness Day. With a few big name incumbent banks recently making headlines regarding their failings in the area, it would be interesting to find out more about what Monzo’s approach and work entails in this extremely important area.
As Naji has pointed out, there’s an event by Monzo in the greatest city in the world Liverpool next week on this very topic:
And, so as to not hijack the main post, the BBC are hosting (+ streaming) an event surrounding digital accessibility, with a range of talks and speakers, which you can view tomorrow here if you’re interested:
Microsoft have also revealed their new Adaptive Controller:
https://news.microsoft.com/stories/xbox-adaptive-controller/
There’s a new, “more accessible” typeface for Airbnb:
Hey @mrkwse thanks for posting!
It’s cool to see these discussions happening with community attendees as well as the people building the product.
It might be worth coming to or watching back the video from this event next week as I think we’ll cover some of the issues surrounding digital accessibility with the panel.
Hey Naji!
I did spot that event and was considering if I could make the trip across, I’m sure there’ll be lots of cool stuff discussed there 
As a profoundly deaf individual, I obliviously hate telephone banking. Like…actual…pure…hatred. It is the most inaccessible service for the deaf and hard of hearing (HoH). Arguably it’s inaccessible for the majority of the population anyway.
This is why Monzo is so perfect for me. Live chat 24 hours a day is the best way for me to communicate with any company. Never before have I ever had so much confidence in a bank’s ability to serve me.
However Monzo does have room to improve, for instance on the videos they publish. They rarely come with subtitles and if subtitles are provided, it is by an automated YouTube bot, which is usually very low quality the Q&A sessions are largely inaccessible, so I never join them.
Good to hear some comments from another profundly deaf person! I, also, don’t get on well with telephone banking. Despite that, I do have a First Direct account 
Contacting them is a bit of a palaver - I don’t have a minicom so have to use a computer version, but the computer version uses full-on Java to run, which I don’t actually have installed because I have security concerns. So I have it on a bootable drive instead, and every time I phone them I have to turn my computer off to boot from the drive, then boot back to my normal desktop afterwards. Much faff.
In-app chat is indeed easier by a vast magnitude.
I too would appreciate properly subtitled Monzo videos, though as most of the interesting ones came from live-streams, I can understand why they haven’t been properly subtitled (a lot of work), and why the auto-generated subtitles are awful (they need really good sound quality).
some handy hints on talking to deaf people
posted on social media by a deaf person
Tangentially, Hawkeye was deaf in the Marvel comics and Deadpool was deaf aware and can be seen uncovering his mouth in one of the comics:
(via @GarethFW on Twitter)
This is so powerful. Thank you for sharing!
I believe YouTube allow users to volunteer transcribe videos. But Monzo may have to enable that ability on their videos. I’ll have a little look into it.
So it’s pretty easy to add captions if anyone fancies doing it. I did the most popular video and also the latest video. A lot of it is just correcting the auto-caption attempts so it’s not difficult at all. It’s a pretty neat interface.
The results are not live yet as they have to be confirmed by other Youtube users.
On a desktop you select the settings cog in the lower right of a video. Subtitles/CC > Add subtitles/CC.
Which other users have to confirm this?
I believe it’ll bounce it around people who have captioned other videos. As after submitting mine it asked me to review other attempts by other users on random videos.
Sounds a worthwhile thing to do. Might give it a go 
I do think Monzo could improve the audio and video quality of their videos though. The automatic captioning is actually impressively accurate with a decent audio feed.
A lot of videos seem outdated, too.