Engaging a Silent Voice

The University of Massachusetts Boston disability services office and IT department were presented with an interesting opportunity when a deaf/blind student registered for three on-line courses. All three classes had a synchronous chat session requirement. The disability services office contacted the remote captioning service the campus uses for live captioning the chat sessions. The captioning replied that they would not be able to provide real time captioning for the student. The service could only provide a complete transcript to be read by the student at the conclusion of the session. Beginning with the accessibility platform embedded within the Wimba Classroom synchronous application the synchronous conferencing support team and the disability services staff created a new support model by blending three additional access technologies into a communication format which supported the student's full participation in the synchronous sessions. In this presentation the support model will be described and demonstrated. Information will also be provided on what the student's training needs were along with the staff support requirement. Resources on creating new support models will also be included.