What types of tools do students who are deaf or hard of hearing use?
Deaf and hard of hearing students account for approximately 16% of the population of students with disabilities in higher education. (http://nces.ed.gov/pubs99/1999187.pdf)
[For more information on the above, see "Review Accommodations" in the FAME Rights and Responsibilities module.]
The primary accommodations for these students are hearing aids, sign language interpretation, and captioning. Hearing aids are considered personal devices and are not the responsibility of the institution. Sign language interpretation is required to be provided by the institution, and in many cases is the most expensive accommodation provided by DSS office. Most students are hard of hearing and have some aural sense that can usually be accommodated with preferential seating and assistive listening devices. Students who are profoundly deaf and have little or no aural sense usually use sign language interpretation and or captioning.
Deaf and hard of hearing students account for approximately 16% of the population of students with disabilities in higher education. (http://nces.ed.gov/pubs99/1999187.pdf)
[For more information on the above, see "Review Accommodations" in the FAME Rights and Responsibilities module.]
- Hardware Tools
- Assistive Listening Device (ALD)– a hardware system (usually wireless) that amplifies the voice of the speaker for the student. Some students use ALDs with headphones – others use a "loop" that works in concert with their hearing aids.
- Hearing Aids
- Closed Caption Decoder - a hardware device that can display captioning on multimedia formats which are encoded for captions.
- Software Tools
- Computer Assisted RealTime Captioning (CART) – a method of human captioning which transcribes spoken language into a textual display.
- Alternative Formats
- Transcripts of audio information
- Captioning
- Sign language
 | Video Clip: CART demo Duration: 4.3 minutes  |
| Video Clip: Hearing Impairments Duration: 0.7 minutes |
