by Paul Hartley
I recently heard that six students at Miami-Dade Community College had their computer-assisted realtime (CART) captioning services removed and replaced with a notetaking service after only a week of use. I would like to point out the benefits of CART compared to notetaking services and encourage you to offer CART services to the students once again.
I am a profoundly deaf junior majoring in biology at Emory University. Since my freshman year, Emory's disability office has contracted for CART services for all of my classes and science laboratories.
I consider realtime captioning to be a valuable part of my classes because the ability to read every word a professor or a student says places me on the exact same level as any other student. Being at the same level as any other student is the major and most important benefit of CART services. I get the same information, hear the same lectures verbatim, feel more a part of a class and hear interesting anecdotes or a professor's corny jokes. I have had notetaking services in high school, and they do not come close to allowing me to fully benefit from the classroom experience. Notes are an abbreviated format of a lecture; only parts of a lecture that are considered "important" are recorded. Notes alone do not necessarily help a student understand a certain concept taught in class; the way a professor explains/teaches the concept can have a big impact in understanding the concept. Obviously, the six students are at a disadvantage of being able to "hear" the professor's explanation if they do not have CART services. I can name instances in high school where I could have benefited by hearing a teacher's explanation of a concept.
The person taking the notes is deciding how and what should be recorded. By reading what a professor is saying, I am able to decide what I want to record and how I record that information. Everyone has his own style of taking notes to suit him best in studying.
As I've stated, CART services in the classroom benefit the hearing-impaired in one big way -- they place the student at the exact same level as any other student in the classroom. Notetaking services may help, but they do not place the student at the same level as others. I believe that it is very important to give any disabled individual equal opportunity. It's simply fair.
I hope that the college will consider my personal experiences along with other facts/testimonies about the benefits of CART and offer the six students CART services once again.
If you have had an experience with captioning or CART that you would like to share, please e-mail it to Peter Wacht, pwacht@ncrahq.org, or mail it to his attention at NCRA, 8224 Old Courthouse Road, Vienna, VA 22312.