Best Practices in Providing Effective Accommodations for Deaf Students [TRANSCRIPT]
LORE KINAST: Thank you so much. Hi, everyone. Kate, do you want to get us started?
KATE LEWANDOWSKI: Hello, my name is Kate Lewandowski. My pronouns are she and her. I’m the strategic support coordinator here at the National Deaf Center on post-secondary outcomes, or NDC. We’re excited to be here with you today. To describe myself before I turn it over to Lore, I am a deaf person that’s using sign language. I am a white woman. I’m wearing a brown coat, brown shirt, and a gold necklace. The wall behind me is black and I have a window off to my right side. And again, I’m happy to be here today. Lore?
LORE KINAST: Hi, everyone. My name is Lore Kinast. I’m the strategic support coordinator at the National Deaf Center. I work very closely with Kate. And I will give a description of myself. I am also a white, deaf woman using sign language. I kind of have dirty blonde, curly-ish hair. I’m wearing glasses. I have a black shirt with a light green blazer. And behind me is a blue background. My pronouns are she and her.
So Kate and I are super excited to be here today, and happy to have the opportunity to connect with all of you and see how we can support you in supporting deaf students on your campus. This issue comes up because deaf students often face multiple challenges when they try to access a college or university system, because the system holds within it barriers that– they occur on a day-to-day basis.
So we want to talk with you about how you can improve things on your campus to make it more accessible for deaf students so that it’s more inclusive, that allows them to see through their entire career, academic career, through graduation. So we’ll be sharing some resources and tips with you. Kate and I– oop. Excuse me. One moment here. We’ll go back one more slide. It was the– yeah, there we go.
We will share some important findings from a survey that we sent out to students who are in colleges and universities. We’ll share effective practices, how you can enhance access on your campus to provide effective accommodations. We want to see deaf students ultimately thrive and fully participate with the social capital that they have privy to on a college campus.
Something you’re going to notice. We use the term “deaf” as kind of an all-encompassing term as we’re presenting today, but behind that term, we are wanting to express a range of deaf people, their lived experiences, their upbringing, their K-12 education, their access to language. All of those things shape who they are as an individual.
So you’ll see us use the word “deaf,” but we’re referring to culturally and non-culturally deaf people, late deaf and hard of hearing, deafblind, deaf disabled, those who sign, those who don’t. All different people have preferences in their identity and their communication modes.
And we also recognize that identity is fluid, so people can change their identity based on the setting they’re in, based on the time of their life, their education, their career. But just know, today, for simplicity, we will use the term “deaf” to describe the whole realm of the deaf community. Let’s move on to the next slide.
KATE LEWANDOWSKI: Great. So our goal is to improve deaf students’ college experiences. Now, your college has systems, policies, and procedures that all play a role in creating an environment that is welcoming to deaf students and impacts their persistence through their educational journey, and their feelings of belonging and affirmation.
At NDC, our mission is to provide evidence-based research to improve the outcomes for educational and employment goals for deaf people. And our audience are typically deaf college students and disability services offices, but it could be anyone– faculty, staff on a college campus, parents, and teachers as well.
We are a federally funded technical assistance and dissemination center. We receive funding from the Department of Education’s Office of Special Education Programs, or OSEP. Because of that, everything we offer is free of charge. It’s no extra cost to you. We are federally funded. So we provide information, data, and resources with the goal of dismantling the systems that create barriers for deaf students, whether they are going into the workforce or continuing their education.
Our goal is that we want to get to a future where all deaf people have the opportunity to receive continuing education and training throughout high school in an equitable way, equitable to their peers. Next slide.
As Lore had mentioned– she mentioned a report– or a survey that we had done. And we’ll share some information from that survey. We surveyed disability services professionals, as well as students across the nation. As you see here on the slide, we put this survey out between April 2023 and May 2024. It was a nationwide survey, and we got responses from 65 disability services professionals. And this survey was sent to colleges, universities, both private and public, community colleges and technical training centers or colleges as well.
So from April 2023 to May 2024, we received answers from this survey. And we’ll be sharing some of that data. This version of the findings from this survey is available. So if you’re a disability services professional, we would love for you to take the most recent iteration of this survey that we’ll be sending out. So at some point during or at the end of the presentation, we’ll provide a QR code, and you can follow that QR code link in order to answer this survey that we currently have out. All right. Next slide.
All right. Also, we want you to understand, before we get going, we want to know about your campuses and what’s happening on your campus. We have had about– 50% of campuses have 10 or fewer students on their campus. 21%– and it’s actually 20.6%, but in essence, 21%– of campuses had 11 to 20 deaf students on their campus. And that result isn’t too surprising.
Deaf students have told us about their college experience, and we’ve realized that they feel isolated. They often feel alone or isolated on campus. They have very few peers. And I want you to let that sink in for a moment, just the isolation that deaf students must feel on campus. Think about your own college campus and how that sense of belonging can relate back to the ability to thrive on campus, to take advantage of all of the opportunities that campus has to offer.
Unfortunately, for many deaf students, their opportunities to engage with others who share their same identities are few and far between. And this also means that many campuses may not have a wealth of resources or even knowledge on how to ensure that deaf students have those same accesses to social opportunities. So we will be talking about this more and what accommodations look like across campus whenever students are on your campus. Next slide.
Often, when you first think about accommodations, something that we want to encourage disability service professionals to think about is that each student is an individual. Now, for this survey, we asked disability services people to share with us, which one of these services and accommodations has your institution provided to deaf students this academic year? And you can see the results of that slide here. Now, this isn’t everything, but these were the most common accommodations that were used.
Also, you’ll notice that the percentages add up to more than 100%. That’s because people were allowed to choose more than one option. Assistive listening systems were a pretty heavily used accommodations, at 56.9%. Those assistive listening systems can be paired with students’ hearing aids or cochlear implants, and it connects to a microphone that the professor or the person speaking would wear.
There are many different types of assistive listening systems or ALDs, Assistive Listening Devices, and there’s no one system that fits every student’s needs. It really depends on what device they have, the particular environment of that classroom, the format of the classroom. Is it a lecture hall, or is it a lab, or a heavy group discussion? All of that will impact the best ALD that would be used. But we saw that that was very, very commonly used on college campuses.
The next line here is captioned media at 81.5%. So that is either post-production captions or captions that have been provided live, much like today. So video clips, recorded lectures, or things of that all have captions on them.
Next down the line are note-takers at 78.5%. That provides deaf students with support in the classroom. They get a summary of the class proceedings, and often, those notes provide so much support since a deaf student is relying on visual information during class while they’re also having to attend to either captions or a sign language interpreter, maybe reading the lips of the professor, looking at the slides, and taking notes. It’s visually a lot to try to manage all at the same time.
Because of that, note-takers are often provided so that the deaf student can expand that cognitive load and they’re able to process less visual information and get the information directly from the instructor.
Next is sign language interpreting, at 89.2%. Sign language interpreters are skilled either hearing or deaf professionals who follow professional and ethical standards. Many are certified or hold some type of state licensure. There are many different types of interpreting services that can be requested by a student. Some of those are ASL or spoken English interpreters, but there are also others, like oral interpreters, who sit and restate all of the English. They do it silently, but while moving their mouth to make it more clear for a person who needs to read lips.
We have transliterators who facilitate between spoken English and a signed representation of English. Tactile and protactile interpreters who interpret for deafblind students. There’s something called cued speech that uses a combination of handshapes that represent English phonetic markers. And then of course, we have trilingual interpreters who work amidst three different languages at the same time. Most commonly, what we see here in the US is sign language, spoken English, and Spanish.
Next, we have speech-to-text services. That is provided– about 73.9% of the schools reported about that. Speech-to-text services is an umbrella term that is used to describe an accommodation where spoken communication, as well as other auditory information, is translated into text in real time. It’s often categorized into two categories. There’s verbatim, where every single word is captured, including false starts.
There’s also a meaning-for-meaning translation that is a summary, and a trained professional conveys the intended meaning. Meaning-for-meaning, you may have heard of either TypeWell or C-Print. Those are two often used meaning-for-meaning real-time text translations. But all of these use a trained human that provides that text-based communication.
Next is testing accommodations, at 81.5%. Testing accommodations should allow a deaf student to demonstrate their content knowledge by reducing barriers to the testing design, the wording, the timing, the format. And what that looks like really depends on the student’s needs. So you will see note-taking, assistive listening systems, sign language interpreters. These are the most commonly used accommodations, but it’s not an exhaustive list.
56.9% of people said they also provide another type of accommodation to deaf students on their campus. And those could be things like priority registration for classes, preferred seating once in a class– that way, the student can sit wherever it works best for them. It may be a specific types of tutoring and other equipment, and accessible parking as well, are some considerations of things that are provided to deaf students for various reasons. Next slide.
So now that we’ve talked about those commonly used accommodations, let’s hone in a little bit on sign language interpreters and speech-to-text services, as those are the most two commonly used accommodations.
As institutions returned to full capacity after the pandemic, deaf students in universities told us that they’re having a hard time finding and retaining in-person interpreters on their campuses. And we’re seeing that more and more as time goes on. So there is a nationwide shortage of interpreters across campuses right now.
We are noticing that campuses are struggling to fill the needs of accommodation requests that are made by deaf students on campus. And with this interpreter shortage in mind, we are seeing that there is an interruption in those services. With sign language interpreting, we’re seeing that 27.2% of requests are sometimes unfilled, and 45.5% of the institutions rarely have an unfilled request. 27.3% say they never have unfilled requests.
So looking at this, that survey told us something that we had noticed. And that is that most campuses use a combination of agencies, contract or hourly employees as interpreters, or staff interpreters in order to fulfill their interpreting needs. We also noted that remote interpreting services are used significantly on college campuses.
Respondents shared with us that that cost of interpreting services and the scarce availability of interpreters, along with the difficulty in covering last-minute assignments, made interpreting services one of their greatest challenges that they have faced over this last year.
Now, next here, we talk about speech-to-text services, and they are struggling to fulfill those requests either. There’s not just the interpreter shortage, but there is also the CART writer shortage, that TypeWell, C-Print. It’s getting harder and harder to find people.
So the percentages we have here are that 22.6% of requests are sometimes or are often unfilled, 38.7% are rarely unfilled, and also, 38.7% are never unfilled. We learned through this survey that CART is the most common service that’s provided to students, that more than half provide remote speech-to-text services.
So they told us that primarily, CART writers are not coming on to campus. They’re not in the classroom providing those services in person. That is very similar to the sign language interpreter problems that they’re having, is that their greatest challenge is last-minute requests. Also, dealing with technical issues and the overall cost.
So this helped us gain a better understanding of what colleges and universities are facing when it comes to coordinating services. We meet often with different colleges and universities across the nation, and they’re telling us they’re struggling to find available interpreters and available speech-to-text service providers. So that shortage is a common issue with both of these types of service providers.
Well, we wanted to learn more, so we asked even more questions. And we see that oftentimes, colleges go to one place to cover all of the accommodations on their campus. They may rely on one agency or one entity to provide all of their services. And those people are having a rougher time than those who have a host of ways to fill the needs they have on campuses.
They may have limited options in their area. They have limited numbers of agencies. They may have limited numbers of service providers. And that leads to a harder struggle with those last-minute requests or changes in schedules. To reduce the frequency of unfilled requests, it’s important that colleges have contracts with multiple vendors or multiple agencies instead of relying on one agency or one interpreter, or even a set of a couple of interpreters, to cover all of the requests.
You want to be able to expand the pool of service providers you work with, whether that be through agencies or individual contractors. And you can do both of those. You want to think about your options for coverage and choosing the best provider that meets that particular student’s students communication needs. All right. With that, I’ll turn it over to you, Lore.
LORE KINAST: So now that you have some context about the accommodations in general, what’s happening on the college campuses, I want to make a shift. I want to look at the different parts of the system that has an impact on students’ accessibility and their ability to thrive.
Equitable access for college students is really more than just accommodations itself. It really needs to consider the students and center that approach, and foster their participation and their accessibility with academics and social aspects outside of class on campus.
So I want to talk more about that. And there’s a video with a coordinator that we have, and she really pays attention to the deaf students and their list of issues and how to achieve those accommodations. So I hope that will give some more insight so we can play that video. Next slide, please.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
– Well, the subjective experience is just that. Two or three people could experience the same event or same type of hearing loss, and yet they’re all going to react to it differently. They’re going to perceive it as happening differently. And so that’s important to remember in disability services when you’re working with students, is that each student comes to you with their own story.
And because I have an undergrad in deaf education, and I took a lot of audiology and speech pathology courses, I know how to read an audiogram. And I know that when I look at an audiogram and I see certain types of hearing loss, I can guess that this person will probably need A, B, and C accommodations, but it’s not set in stone, and I could be wrong.
So it’s good for me to have that background understanding. But also, it’s more important that I listen to the students and really hear what type of experience they’re bringing to the table. What are their concerns? What are some things they don’t want? What are some things that really worked well? I really work hard to make sure that my students’ preferences are heard and that I can provide as many of their preferences as possible.
[END PLAYBACK]
LORE KINAST: Yeah. So just to reiterate their point, deaf students and their experiences are really important. And oftentimes, we start with that interaction with a sit-down with these students to take a chance to analyze and find out what accommodations they need. And it’s not just a checklist that we’re going through. There’s a lot of nuances that happen in this process, as they mentioned a few in the video already.
A lot of things to consider about providing in-person interpreting or trying to really make those accommodations that they need for each individual student, for their experience and their communication preferences, and their academic goals. And what do they want to be involved with on campus? All of these things, we consider.
And again, one size does not fit all. We really have to consider how we accommodate each student in their unique needs. That really makes a big difference. And also, students themselves are the expert. They are the ones using these accommodations, and they will share with you what works best for them. Next slide, please.
So the survey that we issued took a pulse of how many campuses have designated, dedicated academic advisors for each deaf student. And as you can see here on the picture below, for the advisement of students, it’s about at 9.5%. Dedicated intake advisor for deaf students, that is at 45.2%. Then we have dedicated scheduler coordinators for deaf student services, and that came to 64.3%. And lastly, we have service providers such as interpreters and/or captionists, and so on. That’s at 88.1%.
The possibility for those dedicated or assigned systems to meet students’ issues is a high cost, and it really benefits from the consistent knowledge of the staff to provide qualified interpreters, speech-to-text captioning, captioning media, and note-taking. All of these are really important. So we look for ways how we can really improve the capacity to provide effective services in use of these for the students and staff. Next slide, please.
How can we strategize to increase capacity, considering the strategies and improving these capacities to support student services and deaf students is consistent to meet all of the requests? For example, acknowledging what services are of need. Have you collected data? Have you done observations to see where the gaps are? And depending on the number of students you have every year– or some semesters, it can fluctuate– that can also impact what you need.
So we have one designated person for several campuses. So consider that that staff person has to go on campus to provide services to one student, and then move to a different campus. So we have to create creative strategies to meet and provide these designated services for each student.
Also, expand your pool. Contract with multiple providers and vendors. Oftentimes, we see college campuses pick one vendor that they use. I suggest maybe two or three, sometimes four, depending on the number of students that you may have, and the availability in your area. I want you to also consider part-time or full-time staff members in-house. There are many options we can take a look at there.
Thirdly, we need competitive pay. You do a market analysis to see what the going rate is and the cost in your area. So you want to make sure that you’re competitive. And sometimes, we see colleges are kind of behind, and as an impact, they lose services. So it’s time to reevaluate and see what the going rate is in your area.
Think about paid parking. Thinking about the commitment to hourly pay. All of these things can provide a more interesting place to work for interpreters. And also, that would make them more interested to work with you, as well. Also, paid internships. You can use those as providers. Offer remote working spaces. Sometimes, they’re not able to get to one place to another. So you want to find interpreters that can also support your needs.
Next, you want to also identify a way to incentivize employment for these deaf students, who have the knowledge and the expertise and the consistent reliability. And lastly, I want you to expand your network. This is an opportunity to partner with other institutions, community organizations, and local agencies. Really expand that network and find where these people are. And potentially, they can be providers for your students. Next slide, please.
KATE LEWANDOWSKI: All right, thank you. This is Kate speaking. Like we had mentioned before, during the pandemic, we saw a resurgence of remote services, as they became necessary during that time. And now, they have become standard practice for providing accommodations, whether that be a CART service or sign language interpreting. 59% use remote speech-to-text services, and 87.5% provide some type of remote interpreting services. Let’s move down to the next slide.
We’re learning more and more from deaf students about their services, and one thing we’re learning is how remote services are impacting them. It can be a very positive thing when they cannot otherwise get services in their area, if they’re in a rural area or for whatever reason. But as technology changes so quickly, students are experiencing some challenges, and they have to adapt to that.
If colleges aren’t investing in the infrastructure for those remote services to support the heavy use of technology that remote services require, we see students suffer from that. It’s a real barrier. So we want to encourage you to use that very cautiously.
In this slide, you’ll see two different quotes from students. One student said, “I requested video remote interpreting due to limited local interpreters. It worked for me except for the internet connection. It was disconnecting, and the main downside is interpreters are struggling to hear students in the background and their questions or comments.” Another comment from a student said, “I had VRI and Otter.ai as accommodations. It was not successful. It severely limited my participation in class.”
We just recently gave support to a college who was struggling to provide those remote services. They were using Zoom and a microphone, like a lapel mic, to give amplified sound to the deaf student. And they had technical issues that created barriers for that student, whether that be inconsistent audio, drops in the internet connection, problems with the Zoom room. The faculty may forget to let the captioner in or assign the captioner. So they had a lot of barriers.
So we encourage colleges to resolve those issues so that the burden doesn’t fall on the student’s shoulders to resolve all of that. Consistently missing class information over time not only significantly harms that student’s ability to learn, but this also negatively adds to their overall burden. So remote services can be a positive thing. But it can also reduce a student’s overall access.
It is critical to invest in the technology that is required for these remote services. That means you need to get with your IT department. You need to get with procurement. You need to talk with the student to brainstorm solutions that may work well. And it requires working as a whole and collaboratively to ensure that the services are equitable. Let’s move to the next slide.
All right. This is about enhancing remote services and support. You want to strengthen your institutional infrastructure to deliver remote services. That is giving direct support to students and faculty. That may mean calling an in-person meeting to talk things through, have that iterative process of talking with the student.
The role of the college is to provide quality services to your students, and it’s on your staff to understand about the campus’s technology and the possible limitations. What’s the Wi-Fi bandwidth? What technology is or isn’t available?
You also want to make sure that faculty are up to par on understanding what their role is in the classroom and how they can support those service providers who are coming into their classroom. So you want to make sure that your internet connection, all the technology you use, the equipment you have is up to date and in working order. Next slide.
LORE KINAST: So this slide really shows the response with professionals that encourage the use of auto-captioning. As we can see here, it’s pretty much split between 50%, it says that they never used this service or encouraged to use this service. And the other 50% says that they do encourage the use of auto-captions.
So sharing that, we’ve noticed that it has an increase slide, but I also warn everyone, it is not the best practice. There’s a lot of errors that can happen, and it doesn’t really meet the standard currently. We found out that 79.1% of institutions encouraged using of the auto-captioning, and I wish that they would understand that auto-captioning is not accessible. Point blank, it’s not. Next slide, please.
So with captioning to media, it’s interesting. One of the most common accommodations for deaf students– 25.6% said that they’ve used auto-captioning. So we asked, how do they provide these captioning to videos? And the numbers here– and I want to warn you that these numbers do not add up to 100% because some of them used two options or selected two options.
For example, some may add captioning themselves. Some may use a different service to add captioning. So it depends on what your policy is. But anyway, the main point is, the largest numbers of these offices is about 53%– 53.3%– that used these services. And the second highest, 51.2% have in-house, where they have a department or someone they can go to to provide the captioning. And you can see the rest. But interesting enough, you are able to see who’s doing what. Next slide, please.
Deaf students are receiving note-taking accommodations at 78.5%. However, you will also see that 65.9% of institutions tend to use AI to provide these note-taking for students, and that is a high number. And in this, we find that when a peer is also writing this, it’s challenging. So as a result, a lot of them have transferred over to AI. And I see that on a high increase.
So I want to remind everyone that oftentimes, that’s not successful. We need to be careful of its use. Sometimes the context, depending on the course or the technical terminology or concepts used in class, has a lot of complex issues that can have an impact. Sometimes, it’s not a good fit. So all of these things we need to consider before we set AI as a standard use for note-taking. Next slide, please.
So data from note-taking again. How is that service provided? The top shows that student volunteers is used at 43.9%, and student workers. Excuse me, 43.9%. My error. Then we noticed that paid student workers come to 56.1% that provide note-taking. 43.9% relies on volunteers. However, with these two, a lot of the institutions provide the training for note-taking.
Note-taking itself is a skill that requires a specific way to provide these notes. And oftentimes, we see students get a hold of the notes, and they say it’s not clear. They’re not quite sure. There’s some gaps. Things are missing. So we don’t have enough research on the best resolve in technology as of yet. So this is something to think about. Next slide, please.
Just to recap, the use of AI– we have to be careful with that as an accommodation, including students’ feedback and observing the quality of that service. Yes, AI is a programming. It provides some flexibility, some autonomy. It creates access for some specific situations, yes, but it should not be an automatic go-to for an accommodation.
It’s important to discuss with the students, and understand the benefits and the negative parts that can have with AI. So just to warn you all for that. And you want to consistently check in with the students to make sure the quality is there, the efficacy is there. Make sure that the transcripts– read over those to make sure that it’s correct and there aren’t any missing gaps. And if so, we can transfer to a different option. Next slide, please.
KATE LEWANDOWSKI: All right. This is Kate speaking. As Lore had mentioned, it’s the campus’s responsibility to provide effective communication on campus. And we know “effective communication” is the word. It’s the legal term we use. But what does that mean? It really depends on the student, the environment.
Is that student able to communicate fully on campus? Those are all things that you want to consider. And you want to defer to the deaf students’ lived experience. And that is how you can ensure that you’re providing truly effective communication.
This slide here shows the percentage, and it is disability service offices’ ability to gather feedback. So we see 30% is poor, 27.5% is acceptable, and 35% is good. And again, those are all the ability that disability services offices have on gathering feedback.
Gathering feedback is critical, and helps you monitor the quality, consistency and accuracy of information that that student is getting, especially when we’re thinking about interpreting and speech-to-text services. We’ll talk a little bit more later about how to get that feedback, but I want to reiterate the importance of getting feedback.
Secondly here is the ability to assign culturally appropriate interpreters. Think about that student and what their needs are. And that requires you talking with them, finding out what the needs are. And those needs may change depending on the environment they are in.
We saw that there were these percentages shared with us about the ability that deaf students felt they had in getting culturally appropriate interpreters assigned to them. 2.4% said it was very poor, 4.8% said it was poor, 38.1% said it was acceptable, as well as 38.1% saying it was good, and then 16.6% saying it was excellent.
A culturally appropriate interpreter is important because students have often told us that campuses don’t really think about their cultural identities or other identities they hold beyond being deaf. So it’s important that there is a quality service provider who is providing those accommodations and services to the student, but that culturally appropriate understanding is critical.
That could mean it’s a person who shares an ethnicity or a racial background with that deaf student, or who has understanding in the background or linguistics that are used within that culture. There are deaf students who want to participate, maybe, in an event that’s hosted by the Black community. So would a white interpreter without any experience in that realm be the best fit for interpreting that type of event? Probably not.
You also think of other situations that may not be publicly facing, but the student may go and experience different services on campus. And you want to think about added trauma that that student may experience if the interpreter who is present is like someone who’s caused trauma to them. So you want to take those things into consideration when you’re choosing the interpreter.
They need the competence to be able to function well in whatever setting you’re putting that interpreter in. You don’t want to just blindly assign interpreters to any type of event the student might attend. Counseling, for example. You don’t want to put the same interpreter who interprets that student’s classes into their counseling sessions. That’s a really good example of not having a “one size fits all.”
You want a neutral interpreter for things like a counseling session, like other things outside of the classroom, someone who can maintain that confidentiality and their privacy when they’re outside the classroom and doing other things. This definitely requires a real focused set of practices as disability service professionals to make sure you’re meeting each one of these individual needs. Next slide.
All right. Collecting student feedback. It goes beyond institutional improvement, but it empowers students to take ownership. And you can do that by having conversations with the student, by sending them a survey. It could be a survey on paper and pen that they fill out when they come into your front desk. It can be something you email to them. However you receive that feedback, it’s important to get it. I’m going to skip the next slide, so let’s move beyond the next slide to the colorful slide that comes after. And Lore, you take it from here.
LORE KINAST: So accessibility is more than just accommodation as it relates to deaf students. We want it to be an equitable experience. We don’t want isolation, marginalized experiences in college. We want to think about the institution and the programs and how it is accessible to the core. And that is part of providing opportunities for all students there on campus.
And unfortunately, many students currently in the system, they’re not getting sufficient accommodations, and they’re not creating opportunities for these students. And “one size fits all” does not really fit. So these are six different pillars that you can use as an evaluation tool. For example, technology across campus. Captioning. Is that ready at all times? Sometimes, that’s not there. Sometimes, those little things can make a big difference. Next slide, please.
Deaf students are already having to manage academics and think about the accessibility in their experience, and a long list of other things. So just try to provide opportunities for these things already set where they don’t have to request these things.
Graduation is a very common one. If you’re having a big event on your campus every year where you tend to draw in a lot of students, go ahead and provide that accessibility automatically without seeking requests. This will also foster more participation for all students on campus. That’s just one input I wanted to throw out there for consideration. Next slide, please.
It doesn’t matter if you have one to five deaf students or if you have a large number of deaf students or deaf faculty, so far and so on. You want to celebrate the deaf community on your campus with different types of events and activities. Show a film. Have a question-and-answer afterward.
Have an event where you have a deaf student and another deaf student, that they don’t know each other on campus, and host a meet and greet. Bring those individuals in, where we can connect and interact with each other. Invite a speaker from the deaf community. These are ways that you can really foster more connection within the deaf community on campus. Next slide, please.
We found that there are differing perceptions as it relates to the institutions itself. Some tend to not follow the standardized captioning policy, some just provide captioning all the way for students, and some think that that benefits all students, when in fact, it does not.
Some institutions say that we consider the cultural identity of students, which is good, as Kate mentioned earlier, but not for all students. We want to make sure that the staff is also involved, where you consider their culture with workshops and things of that sort to increase their awareness and knowledge. So make sure you’re providing that. Next slide, please.
Students are frustrated living an isolated life on campus because the accessibility office has specific policies that they must follow, which creates isolation. And as college students, having to submit a request two weeks prior sometimes can be challenging. Sometimes, you may be found aware of an event two or three days before. So I want you to be mindful of the policy and share this messaging with the students.
So when they see that, right away, they’ve already felt marginalized. Hey, I didn’t get an opportunity to even be involved in this. So maybe tweaking the phrasing of your policy will be better. Next slide, please. I was going to skip that one too, because we’ve named this already. I can throw it back to Kate.
KATE LEWANDOWSKI: Great. So we’ll move on to the next slide even from here. This is Kate. OK, lovely. So to wrap up, we’re getting to the end of our time. We have so much information we want to share with you, and it’s always tough for us to figure out what to leave out of these sessions and what to include.
But the point is, we want you to know that we’re here. We have more information for you. We have online modules that are self-paced. You can work on those at any time. We have it on coordinating services, about how to get feedback from students, about how to talk to your faculty and staff about making their classroom accommodating to deaf students.
We even have two certificate programs. Well, they’re microcertificates that are related to deaf awareness. That’s where you just learn about deaf people at large. What is the deaf community? What are some of the accommodations they use? Then we also have another micro certificate called Accessibility Practices for Deaf Students. It’s geared specifically toward people who work in student disability services in order to better support and accommodate the students who are on your campus.
So these microcertificates are great programs to work through. They’re free of charge. They cost you nothing. And it’s something that you can do while you are functioning in your role. And you’re able to, again, take this at your own pace, either these online modules that are about an hour a piece, or working through these microcertificates. Next slide.
And I think we’re going to skip this one too for time and move on to the next one with the QR code. Lovely. OK, Lore, you go ahead with the QR code. Go back one.
LORE KINAST: Go back one.
KATE LEWANDOWSKI: There we go. [LAUGHS]
LORE KINAST: Just to wrap up with this, as Kate mentioned earlier, we have a survey that we’re still collecting data with looking for professional responses, and we have some new questions we’ve added in there. So there’s a QR code. You can take a snapshot of that and fill out this survey. It will be open until the end of May.