by Andy Nelson
One of my former realtime captioners forwarded me this message stating that you needed help with getting realtime captioning for your deaf students at your school. It is my pleasure to help you in any way I can.
First, a little background. I was born with normal hearing, and lost it when I was five months old to a profound degree. Since then, I wore hearing aids, and my parents brought me up in an auditory/verbal setting and mainstreamed me all through school. I didn't use realtime captioning until the last few months of my senior year in high school, after a long battle with the school district. Even though it was just for one class, I could tell right away that it would be the most beneficial tool in the classroom for me as a deaf student. When I applied for college, the main deciding factor for me was whether or not the school provided realtime captioning. I chose the University of Washington in Seattle because of its close location to home (I lived 20 miles away), and they asked me no questions when I requested realtime captioning.
In my two years at UW, for the first time, I felt on equal footing with my fellow classmates, and I have never had that opportunity. Realtime captioning allowed me to get everything the professor says in class, word for word, as well as comments or questions students have during the lecture. This enabled me to actively participate in discussions and lectures, something I had never ever been able to do before.
Since then, times have changed. I received a cochlear implant in May of this year and have been turned on for four months. I have transferred schools to Washington State University, in Pullman, Wash., because it offered the major that I wanted to pursue, and UW did not. This is my third year, and I have tried to get realtime captioning, but due to the rural location, it is hard getting a stenographer to drive the two hours to get here, caption the lectures, drive the two hours back home. We came up with remote realtime captioning. The principle is the same, with the exception of the stenographer being based in California, and the whole system is connected via the Internet. We rushed the process, and as a result, ran into way too many problems. Right now, I'm using notetaking. I can tell you this: The difference is night and day. Not a day goes by that I wish I had realtime captioning at that moment, working in the classroom, because the amount of information that I miss is absolutely phenomenal. Because of this, I have had to work even harder, read the books twice over, read the notes over, and even have gone as far as to find a tutor to help with math.
There is no replacement for realtime captioning, unless you had professors who worked with your deaf students one-on-one in a full lecture class, which is highly unlikely. If these students do not receive realtime captioning, they are being denied their rights of equal access to education, as stated in the Americans with Disabilities Act. It does not matter "how well the student is doing, with or without." What matters is this: Each and every student has a right to have equal access to education. This works by providing ramps and elevators for students using wheelchairs to providing Braille texts for blind students to providing realtime captioning to deaf students. Each of these tools simply helps level the playing field disabled students have with their fellow classmates.
I do seriously hope that you and the Board of Educators at your university reconsider your/their decision to deny deaf students their right to have equal access to education. Further continuation of this is blatant disregard for the Americans with Disabilities Act.
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.