This has to be a generational thing. There is no way a deaf person growing up now is not going to be using the internet.
Partial literacy is all you need for YouTube or video calls. Plenty of hearing people can read well enough for that too, or to find what they need at the store, but can't read well enough to e.g. summarize the main points of a newspaper story. I've seen estimates that something like 20 - 40% of Americans are functionally illiterate in that way. For the Deaf, it is even higher.
Re:BBC Subtitle Guidelines
by adammarples on Friday December 23, 2022 @04:54PM
(#34111031)
A speech and language therapist tells me that spelling and reading is hard for deaf children because we match phonics to text but they don't have access to phonics, so they have much lower literacy levels without specialist help
Still, I suppose that many people still want the original phrasing, not a translation where subtleties might get lost.
Closed captions are usually available for that need (which is also helpful for people who became hard of hearing later in life). But that's a separate need than what is effectively translation.
Deaf people who speak sign language natively approach English as a second language. And it is hard to learn a spoken language when deaf. English literacy rates among ASL native speakers are rather low.