Remote Captioning: An Effective Support for Hearing Impaired Students

Partially deaf students can benefit from remote captioning, which allows them to participate in the university lectures and events. Up until now, it's been difficult for hearing impaired students to completely engage themselves in these activities.

Remote captioning is a mix of technologies that allow people with hearing loss to read a transcript in the real-time while attending the event on their laptop or mobile device. Transcription services also plays an important role in assisting hearing impaired students.

How Lectures are Recorded

Lectures, seminars, tutorials and other educational discussions are recorded using a specially optimized microphone. The audio feed is sent through a phone line to a stenocaptioner, who quickly does academic transcription of the events as they happen.

It is not necessary for the stenocaptioner to be in the same room as the speaker. The transcript, then appears on the student's computer through a special website that transmits "streamed text" over wireless internet.

Live Captioning

The main benefit of live captioning is that it allows you to follow along with a lecture with only about a two second delay. Most stenocaptioners are required to have a high accuracy level in order to get the job. Stenocaptioners do not necessarily work exclusively with universities, but the trend is that many campuses are turning to them to help deaf students. Some of the types of live captioning that are used in schools are LRC (Live Remote Captioning) and CART (Communication Access Realtime Translation).

Characteristics of Remote Captioning

Remote captioning is designed to be easy to read and can be archived for future use. It's easy to produce in a short time, since the captioner doesn't have to be in the same location as the speaker.

In order to offer high-quality remote captioning services, you need high quality recording equipment, including a state of the art microphone. Most hotels and conference venues for businesses already have top of the line audio equipment.

You will also need special remote captioning software like Speche and access to a teleconferencing platform such as Skype. An appropriate audio system for starting from scratch is an Acoustic Magic Voice Tracker. It comes with a microphone that picks up voices from thirty feet away.

Also Read: How Effective Is Podcast Captioning

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