My name is Rikki Poynter and Iâm officially all about trying to make the Internet as accessible for the d/Deaf/HOH community as possible.
There are 38,000,000 people who are d/Deaf and hard of hearing in the United States alone. 38,000,000 people who donât have the proper access to information and entertainment, both online and offline.
I have been on YouTube for five years. Four of those years, I was strictly a makeup b/vlogger. After four years of b/vlogging about makeup, I started growing out of it but had no interest in leaving YouTube.
For the past year, I have been a Deaf Vlogger talking about regular things like my favourite movies, TV shows, Pokemon, but not only that - Iâve also been making a  YouTube career (for lack of a better term) talking about d/Deaf/HOH awareness and the lack of accessibility on the Internet, especially on YouTube which is one of the most popular, if not the most popular, entertainment website right now.
My work to get YouTubers to closed caption their videos has been talked about on Huffington Post, Mic News, BBC Ouch, BBC Newsbeat, ABC News, and even international news. I have been shouted out by Tyler Oakley who started closed captioning his videos because of me. John and Hank Green gave me the opportunity to be a Featured Creator for VidCon 2015 to host a workshop about d/Deaf/HOH awareness and closed captioning on YouTube. In November, I will be heading off to a college in Pennsylvania talking about d/Deaf/HOH life, audism, and the like.
My life goal now is to take this further. Not only do I want to make fun content just to give people comfort when they want a YouTube video, but I want to talk about the important stuff and I want to do it well. I want people to be informed. I want people to care. I want to go around the country and the world talking about how important it is for things to be accessible on some of the most popular and most used things in this generation. I want to be part of the d/Deaf/HOH representation.
But I canât do that alone. I need your help. We all need your help. To be able to produce better quality content, to be able to do this work around the world. Stuff like this works better with lots of people working together and I hope that we will be able to work together.
If you decide to become a Patron, then we can do this together.
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