Education - Accessibility

Accessibility in education gives all people the same access to educational experiences, services, and information, whether a person has a disability or not. Unicef estimates that there are approximately 240 million children with disabilities worldwide.

 

Breaking down communication barriers is critical for creating an inclusive learning environment. One of the challenges of inclusivity in these environments is making learning materials available to the deaf and hard of hearing (DHH).

Captioning lecturer's speech to improve the learning experience of Deaf and Hard of Hearing students.

Large Neural Networks consisting of billions of parameters and trained on massive data sets have brought about a step change to language technologies. So much so that it is now possible to automatically transcribe speech in realtime. This is commonly known as automatic speech recognition (ASR) or speech to text (STT). Cloud-based, service-orientated deployment of these technologies has democratized access to these technologies across devices via apps.

 

The Rochester Institute of Technology has roughly 1,500 students who are deaf or hard of hearing3. They have rolled out Microsoft Translator technology to automatically caption a lecturer's speech while they deliver a lecture using Microsoft Powerpoint. As the technology is multilingual and cross-device, students can also choose to receive the information in a language of their choosing.

 

Lecturers at the learning institute already have American Sign Language (ASL) interpreters. Academic staff see the technology as augmenting ASL rather than replacing it, due to the fact that gestures can convey several words at once making it less taxing to interpret than reading.