HQ in Germany has handed down a mandate that we all must go through this online 'learning expedition' course.
It's apparently supposed to be voluntary, but someone somewhere has decided that they need to make numbers go up, and so we are being forced to volunteer. Alright, fine; 2-3 hours of watching videos, answering some painfully obvious questions about teamwork and the like, and wondering what's up with the bear on a unicycle (and then subsequently being admonished by the website for choosing the "I'm still confused by the bear on a unicycle" option later in the 'lesson').
The problem comes with some of the videos. The hired voice actor is easy enough to understand, but some of the speakers from within the company have quite heavy accents. Which would be bad enough, but then they have these 'phone call' videos (where you're supposed to be on a phone call with the person speaking in the video), and in an effort to increase immersion (I guess) it sounds like they actually recorded them calling in on a telephone. The words are incomprehensible to me due to a combination of the poor audio quality, the accents, and the weird volume changes.
I couldn't find accessible transcripts or captions - and I have a theory there aren't any past the script the speakers read from - but I'm refusing to 'volunteer' until accessible versions have been made available. I posted on the internal-attempt-at-a-social-media-clone asking for links to the accessible versions, but I'm not sure how that's going to go given the 'deadline' for completing this thing is on Monday.
I can't be the only one who finds it hard to understand these videos; we're a VERY large international company, and I find it hard to believe that we don't have a single other employee who has hearing issues or sensory issues or can't retain audio information etc.
Even if they only email a copy of the scripts (if they can't post anything on the learning website in so short a time) it would help, and hopefully make a point for next time that this is something that it would behoove them to offer.
I'm not used to standing up for something like this, and a random comment made by my direct supervisor yesterday - about there not actually being any employees who'd need the accessible version because they'd just fire them - is making me uncomfortable: I'm not sure how serious he was being. I will ask him about it today, but I felt the need to share outside of that.
