Educational Media Technology For Hearing-Impaired Persons: A Federal Perspective

Special I :SSUE Educational Media Technology For HearingImpaired Persons A Federal Perspective Ernest E. Hairston his year marks the 30th anniversary of the authorization of the Captioned Films for the Deaf Program to conduct research , training, production, acquisition , and the distribution of educational media. That authorization enabled the Captioned Films Program to expand beyond its original purpose of simply providing subtitled films to people who are deaf and hard of hearing. It resulted in a number of timely and exciting projects, such as the four now defunct regional media centers for deaf people. That authorization also enabled the U.S. Department of Education (formerly the Office of Education) to sponsor the annual Symposium on Research and Utilization of Educational Media for Teaching the Deaf, better known as the Lincoln Symposium, held at the University of Nebraska between 1965 and 1983- After a long hiatus, we are attempting to pick up where we left off. My purpose is not to cover the history of the Captioned Films Program, but to describe briefly some educational media technology and related projects funded by the U.S. Department of Education, and specifically the Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP) over the past few years relating to the field of deafness, and to offer some personal observations regarding access to media and communication . Most of you are already familiar with the captioned films/video and the various closed-captioned television projects. An Important Conference One catalyst that brought a new thrust to the Captioned Films Program was the "Conference on Literacy and the Hearing Impaired" held May 18-20, 1989, in Washington, DC. This conference resulted in OSEP adapting and implementing several recommendations in the form of program priorities. Recommendations in the area of technology included a call for: 1. research to be conducted to determine the range of instructional uses of captioned television in literacy development (with different populations such as hearing-impaired individuals , learners of English as a American Annals of the Deaf second language, adult beginning readers, and people with learning disabilities); 2. studies to be conducted to determine the benefits of captioning in teaching reading in both classroom and out-of-classroom situations; 3. research to be conducted into developing special technologies such as interactive, tailorable user-generated captioning, whereby the user can generate or manipulate captions for implementation within literacy programs; and 4. research into issues relating specifically to the captioning process, including the speed of captions, their syntactic structure, verbatim/edited versions, caption placement, concept density, size, color, font, synchronization of captions with speakers , and the use of "dynamic" captioning techniques. The drafters of the recommendations emphasized that this research should be conducted with a population that includes a range of ages, types of communication, hearing losses, first languages, language levels, socioeconomic circumstances, and additional disability conditions. Funded Projects The priorities that evolved from the above recommendations attracted numerous applications. Seven were funded, namely: 1. The Conference Center's (Silver Spring, MD) "Captioned Television and the Learning of Literacy Skills by Educationally Disadvantaged Adults." The Center proposed to investigate the impact of captioned television on the literacy skills of educationally disadvantaged adults (from correctional institutions), with a specific focus on the effects of captioned television on the incidental learning of vocabulary and comprehension skills. 2. Gallaudet University's "Acceptability , Readability, and Comprehensibility of Caption Format Features: Perspectives and Responses of Deaf and Hard of Hearing Caption Consumers ." This project attempts to improve captioning systems through the selection and testing of various caption format features to see their effects on acceptability, readability, and comprehensibility of captions prepared for deaf and hard of hearing consumers. 3. Gallaudet University Research Institute's (GURI) "Captioned Video as Teacher-Made Materials for Vocabulary -Building in Young Deaf Children." This cooperative project between GURI and the Marie Katzenbach School for the Deaf in New Jersey examines the potential of using conventional video cameras and relatively new captioning software to introduce vocabulary to early elementary and pre-school children, and for other educational purposes. 4. National Captioning Institute's "Evaluation of Innovative Captioning Features as Effective Methods of Delivering Television Program Content ." This project proposes to determine whether technological modifications (speed, number of words, etc.) improve...