Why schools need to normalise live captions

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Educators discuss the needs of deaf students, and the new technology that has made live captioning possible in schools

IN AUSTRALIA, more than 20,000 school students live with a level of hearing loss that requires the wearing of hearing aids or cochlear implants. These young people all require support to reach their educational potential, yet a shortage of Auslan interpreters and other supports has meant that schools still have significant gaps when it comes to assisting deaf students. According to Dr Elizabeth Levesque, general manager of the Victorian Deaf Education Institute (VDEI), tools such as real-time captions are hugely beneficial to deaf and hard-of-hearing students. However, “astronomical” costs – up to

A pioneer in professional interpreting and translation since 1984, Oncall Language Services has grown from a local interpreting service to an international entity with operations across Australia and offices in Europe. Its top-tier language solutions aid major government departments and healthcare organisations in communicating with culturally and linguistically diverse communities worldwide. CaptionConnect was born out of the urgent need for automatic live captioning and to address access challenges in sign language across sectors. This state-of-the-art, cloud-based software leverages artificial intelligence to provide real-time captioning and transcription, offering myriad benefits for scenarios such as live presentations, webinars, legal proceedings and multi-speaker conversations. It serves as a transformative bridge to inclusivity and communication, fostering excellence in all students. With its intuitive interface and impressive precision, CaptionConnect dismantles learning obstacles and elevates communication in classrooms, workplaces and the wider community.

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“Prior to this technology, there was never a thought about real-time captioning in schools because it was known that it’s just impossibly expensive”

Dr Elizabeth Levesque, Victorian Deaf Education Institute

$1,500 per day per class for manual transcribing by a stenographer – have largely kept these tools out of the classroom, making it very difficult for schools to provide equitable access to education. The dawn of AI has sparked some hope, particularly with the rise of speech-to-text technology. Levesque notes that while initial products still had very high error rates and lag times, the technology has been evolving and improving rapidly – and today, we are in a position to offer speech-to-text as a viable support tool in classrooms. For the last four years, the Department of Education Victoria has provided funding to VDEI to implement automatic real-time captioning in schools. Over this time, VDEI has worked closely with Oncall Language Services to explore their software CaptionConnect and make it possible for schools to access it. The technology has been continually refined and perfected, and the institute is now working to roll out the software to schools across Victoria.

“Prior to this technology, there was never a thought about using real-time captioning in schools, because it was known that it’s just impossibly expensive,” Levesque says. “In the past, some schools may have used note-takers, but there were very few other options. When it comes to speech-to-text technology, a high level of accuracy and short lag time was very important to us. CaptionConnect’s lag time is down to about one and a half seconds, which is just extraordinary and very accurate. “The AI also checks itself as it goes through, and if it misunderstands a phonologically similar word, it checks the context and amends it.”

While it’s been a long journey to get to this stage, Levesque is confident that the effort is well worth it to ensure that students who are deaf or hard of hearing or have additional learning needs are provided with equitable access to learning. She notes that while automatic captioning technology will be useful for deaf and hard-of-hearing students, that is far from its only application. Captions can also be beneficial to autistic students as well as those with auditory processing disorders and other disabilities such as dyslexia and ADHD.

One of the schools trialling the technology is Rosanna Golf Links Primary School, a first adopter of CaptionConnect. Thom Jackson, deaf facility coordinator at the school, says the introduction of captions was a “no-brainer” for him and has been particularly useful in reducing listening fatigue in students. He notes that while trying to create change in schools is often challenging, normalising the use of captions is an important step to providing inclusive and equitable education. The school began by trialling the software in staff meetings, where they were able to quickly spot any improvements that were needed in terms of accuracy or delays. Once that was done, they identified a tech-savvy teacher to help implement the technology across classrooms.

“Teachers can be quite hesitant to adopt change, and I think that comes from the ever-evolving new reading, maths, wellbeing program, etc,” Jackson says. “When you’ve been teaching for a long time, you need to learn new things quite frequently, and that can be exhausting. As a coordinator, you expect some staff to be early adopters of change and others to be later adopters who need more support. You just need to look at your staff’s various levels of familiarity with the technology, with computer usage, and that they have trust in the child to use a device in the classroom.”

Part of the challenge was figuring out privacy, and recording concerns and addressing any anxiety about that among teachers. Jackson says the solution has been to base the technology usage on teachers’ comfort levels – for example, if they only feel comfortable putting captions up, but not with children accessing recordings off-site outside of school hours, then you can implement that. Ultimately, he says captioning should be broadly normalised, and taking your teachers on the journey to have this technology widely available in schools is an excellent starting point. “The world is really your oyster with this technology,” Jackson says. “It can be used in so many different ways. And knowing all of the literature about listening fatigue, it’s really a no-brainer to give our kids a different way to access information. “I want to see a day when live captioning is normalised in all of our schools, whether you’re in a class with children with hearing loss or not.” To learn more about CaptionConnect and how it supports students in the classroom, click here.

Hearing impaired student learning online

Published 07 Aug 2023

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“I want to see a day when live captioning is normalised in all of our schools, whether you’re in a class with children with hearing loss or not”

Thom Jackson, Rosanna Golf Links Primary School

Captions in the classroom: the first-hand experience

“Captions are already all over social media, which has been fantastic to see,” Jackson explains. “I asked children in our classrooms whether they access captioning at home on their TV, and many do. So it’s not just for those with hearing loss – it’s for everybody. We want to normalise it to the extent that our children expect to see captions without having to ask for them.” When it comes to physically implementing the technology, Jackson says that having a “natural” first adopter on hand to assist is a great step to take. For him, that was Daniel Anderson – a teacher of the deaf at Rosanna Golf Links Primary School. Anderson says students have “loved” seeing the captions come up onto the board, while others prefer to have them on their own devices. The technology also has a wide variety of applications for teachers, from enabling them to keep a record of lessons to refer to, to allowing students who were absent from a lesson to easily catch up on the work they missed.

Features of CaptionConnect

Real-time captioning and lesson transcription

Lesson transcripts to reuse as a study resource

Captions across multiple devices

Benefits of CaptionConnect

Helps foster active participation

Reduces listening fatigue

Faster, more cost-effective than physical note-taking

Allows for more accessible learning