Students at Loyola University, Maryland are captioning live sports events to gain critical work experience and enable the university to deliver on its campus-wide accessibility goals.
Read: Loyola students to provide live captioning for athletics events
Ironically, the routine glitches in YouTube’s auto-captions service led the university to hire a student volunteer team to caption its official videos. From there, the university’s technology training manager reassigned the students to caption live sports games for parents or grandparents who may have hearing issues – with the universal benefit quickly emerging.
Particular interest in the work-study initiative is expected from undergraduate students considering careers in stenography and/or provision of real time captions for accessibility.
Separately, student guidelines for access to realtime captioning services were recently issued by the US Departments of Education and Justice, after court cases taken by two students in California, who requested captions as a study facilitation.
Essentially, the facilitation obligations stipulated by the IDEA and ADA legal provisions are independent of one another when a student requests captions for their study, and must be addressed on a case-by-case basis, according to the FAQs issued.
