Kirsteen Allison: The challenges for deaf students in a Covid 19 world

As students prepare to return to university this autumn, many deaf students are at risk of being further disadvantaged by the move to online learning.

10 years after the Equality Act 2010, and 22 years after my first experience of higher education, I have discovered that deaf students still struggle to participate equally to their hearing peers.

In 1998, when I began studying my History degree, it was the beginning of three years of cancelled notetakers, lecturers expecting me to lip-read with their back turned and lecturers even refusing to wear my radio aid device because it “didn’t match their jumper” – yes that really happened.

I left with an Ordinary Degree, rather than an Honours Degree. This is something I have always regretted but my grades were falling, and my mental health was suffering. By my third year, I had no notetaker in any of my lectures and tutorials and I stopped bothering to turn up myself.

I’ve returned to Higher Education several times since but with mixed results. I successfully obtained a Masters degree thanks to a very supportive lecturer (also a friend), yet the actual university disability service did not make contact with me until half way through my course and that was to offer me a telephone interview. This was 2018 – 20 years after my first entry into Higher Education.

Covid 19 has further shown how much still needs to be done since the Equality Act 2010. It has certainly shown me that universities and schools still have not gotten to grips with the very basics such as transcripts, captioning, notetakers and providing slides in advance.

Deaf pupils and students will struggle with online learning. One example is where schools put their information for parents onto YouTube or offer YouTube lessons. I asked my child’s school (politely) if there were any captions or a transcript. I was told this would take a few weeks – by which point, whatever I needed to know could be too late to act upon. Why not just do an email newsletter?

Some video platforms offer in built captioning, but these can be slow, inaccurate and struggle with certain accents and multiple people talking at once. I fear in this coming academic year, more schools and universities will see this as a cheap and easy solution, rather than the best solution.

One example of this problem was when I signed up to participate in a free online university ‘upskilling’ course. I informed the university I was deaf and would require additional support. “Not a problem”, I was told. “We will enable captions”.

I joined the first webinar and there were no captions. I asked why and I was told “we thought Zoom would do it automatically”. However, Zoom captions only works if someone in the call acts as the captioner – there are no automatic captions. Teams and Skype have automatic captions but quite often a word is substituted for a rude one.

Another solution is to book a stenographer, notetaker or interpreter. I asked the university mentioned above if they could provide a remote captioner. Again, I was told “no problem”. The notetaker entered the webinar and typed extremely slowly and I could tell that she was not capturing everything that was said. Then half way through the webinar, she suddenly disappeared.

I was told “we are doing this in the middle of a pandemic”. Yes it is a stressful situation for everyone but the pandemic does not eliminate the duty to make reasonable adjustments. It cannot be used as an excuse for discrimination or a lack of accessibility.

The difficulty in this coming year is that there are too few notetakers and interpreters to meet the demand from deaf students who are now having to learn online. As demonstrated in my example above, there is a lack of fully qualified and experienced communication support workers.

Those with the proper expertise will be in much higher demand but cannot accommodate everyone. This leaves many students relying on poor automatic captions, a trainee interpreter, or worse a member of university staff acting as the captioner who has little to no experience of supporting a deaf person.

Some courses are practical and therefore cannot be undertaken online. In those situations, students must wear masks, but this also presents problems. Deaf people cannot lip read through a mask. Government guidance states that you can remove your mask if you need to communicate with a deaf person but how many hearing people actually know this?

You can rest assured that the majority of universities (if any at all) will not have made their staff and students aware of this exemption rule. There is the option of clear face masks but again – how many universities will invest in these clear face masks? Will all staff and students have them? Where will the money come from?

How can schools and universities handle these problems and ensure deaf pupils and students are fully supported? Well, the number one solution is to plan ahead. Establish if there are any deaf or disabled participants and what their needs are.

If they need a captioner or interpreter, book one in plenty of time to ensure availability – especially of one who is fully qualified and experienced. Other solutions include providing the deaf person with slides in advance and/or a transcript. This is not an alternative to a captioner but can make the captioner’s job a little easier.

If you do book a captioner or interpreter, check their qualifications and experience. Check if they are familiar with the university’s preferred video platform – the captioner who disappeared had no experience of it.

Universities and schools can keep in touch with students and parents via email and text message. Any videos uploaded to Moodle or similar should come with captions or a transcript – do not wait for someone to ask. Lastly, do not rely on in built captions. They are most likely to be full of mistakes. They will work best in very small, one to one, interactions.

For practical tasks, book an interpreter or notetaker to make communication easier whilst still using masks. Perhaps use a smaller bubble of people to minimise background noise and write things down where possible.

If you have any tips or advice of your own to share, please include those in the comments.

Kirsteen Allison is a Scottish cochlear implant user who lip reads. She has a hearing dog for deaf people. Kirsteen is an equality adviser, careers adviser and HR adviser. She is a finalist in the Shaw Trust 2020 Disability Power List and is a member of the Academy of Disabled Journalists. She is a long-term volunteer for deaf organisations and advocates for equality in education and employment.