“Really? The deaf can’t see the people applauding all around them?”

Ed, the question is not whether the standard practices of closed captioning are all completely necessary, or whether the deaf could perhaps do well enough without some of them. The question is whether the use of “[applause]” is indeed standard.

If your criticism of Obama is really that he didn’t take care to ensure that those doing the closed captioning deviated from standard practice to avoid including any information that might potentially be redundant, then just say that explicitly.

If it’s not, then you’d do better to just retract the original criticism than to find yourself pivoting towards such an absurd argument.