NTID Announces Major Changes

Editor: Last week we began a series of articles that point out encouraging signs that the needs of members of the oral hearing loss community (my term for people with hearing loss who prefer oral communication, including hard of hearing, late-deafened, and oral deaf folks) are finally being acknowledged and addressed. This article addresses one such change recently announced by the National Technical Institute for the Deaf (NTID).

NTID is a college within the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), and has a long and proud tradition as one of the major Deaf education centers in the US. Now it seems they are recognizing and responding to increasing demands for access by members of the oral hearing loss community; they are greatly increasing their capability to provide text-based transliteration services for those students "who do not benefit from sign language transliteration services".

We at Hearing Loss Web applaud their decision to accommodate a student population that is increasingly relying on hearing aids and cochlear implants, in addition to sign language. However we believe that real time captioning (CART) is far superior to the C-Print option that NTID proposes. CART provides a verbatim transcription of the spoken message, while C-Print does not. According to the NTID website (http://www.ntid.rit.edu/cprint/how_cprint.php), "The [C-Print] captionist includes as much information as possible, generally providing a meaning-for-meaning (not verbatim) translation of the spoken English content."

Just as members of the Deaf community are entitled to a signed message that is as nearly equivalent to the spoken message as possible, members of the oral hearing loss community are entitled to a text message that is as nearly equivalent to the spoken message as possible. We strongly encourage NTID to rethink this discriminatory policy.

Here are excerpts from the press release. For the full release please point your browser to http://www.ntid.rit.edu/media/full_text.php?article_id=362

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ROCHESTER, N.Y., Feb. 11-The National Technical Institute for the Deaf, a college of Rochester Institute of Technology, has announced a new plan that reflects bold and significant changes with its academic programs, access services and outreach efforts to more closely align with deaf and hard-of-hearing students' needs.

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Students who know sign language and can benefit from sign language transliteration, notetaking, and/or assistive listening systems as access accommodations can request them. For those students taking courses in the other RIT colleges who do not benefit from sign language transliteration services, an alternative accommodation will be provided and will be based on an individual assessment of student need and on consideration of that need in relationship to the educational context. For most of these students, a text-based transliteration service, such as C-Print, will be provided.

To address these changing and growing needs, NTID will significantly expand C-print resources, as well as add more interpreters.

"In order to accomplish this goal, we will be significantly increasing access services, human resources, investing in new technology and conducting research on the effectiveness of various access services," Hurwitz said. "We recognize that each student is an individual with unique needs. As hearing aid technology continues to improve, in addition to the increasing use of cochlear implants, students are using their hearing more than they ever have in the past, which changes their needs for support."