The previous service was treated like a “special case” exception, she said, placing an additional burden on students with disabilities to seek out University accommodations for their needs. For online classes - before Zoom introduced the live transcription feature - faculty members could request remote transcribers to feed live text to students with registered accommodations.īut von Alvensleben criticized the University for not implementing a schoolwide captioning tool sooner. Hearing-impaired students who registered their accommodations needs with SAS can usually be accompanied to lectures by a stenographer when classes meet in person.
“It’s up to the user to decide if they want subtitles/transcripts or not, which is an accessibility best practice,” Morgan wrote in an email to the News.Īdditionally, von Alvensleben pointed out that faculty members may not effectively implement it in their classes if enforcement and awareness of the new tool are limited. Most users affiliated with the medical school are bound under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, which creates functional constraints on Zoom, related to privacy and security standards.įaculty, staff and students can enable the “live transcription service” function by navigating to the settings page of their Yale Zoom accounts.Īutomatic captioning is not turned on by default during Zoom sessions, so meeting hosts have to click on the button in their toolbar to allow participants to view the dialogue as subtitles, a running transcript or both. But she believed that the feature became available earlier that month.Īutomatic closed captioning is available for all non-HIPAA Yale Zoom accounts, according to Morgan. “Out of respect for that person’s life and their ability to access information, you should turn on closed captions.”Īccording to Yale ITS Digital Accessibility Specialist Michelle Morgan, Zoom Video Communications did not notify the University of the change, so users discovered the feature on their own in late October. “The use of closed captioning is a larger part of getting faculty members and students to understand that disability shouldn’t be treated as a case-by-case special exception but as a part of a person’s life,” said Mafalda von Alvensleben ’22, president of Disability Empowerment for Yale, a group of undergraduate disabilities advocates.
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But Conklin said that after Zoom itself soft-launched a new live transcription feature, Yale ITS decided to work with campus administrators to determine how to best deploy and share the new feature, which users can turn on in their account settings pages. Since March, student disabilities advocates have voiced concerns about the unavailability of automatic closed captioning, which may obstruct students who are deaf or hard of hearing from fully participating in classes.Īccording to Elizabeth Conklin, the University’s associate vice president for institutional equity, access and belonging, Yale IT services and the Student Accessibility Services teams have been working for months to implement a live closed captioning solution for all of Yale. Six months after classes first transitioned online, students and faculty members can now opt to use live closed captioning in their Zoom sessions.