Nicola and Silvie: Why we are campaigning for Live Captioning software in educational settings

We are Nicola and Silvie (photo below) mothers to deaf children, striving to make education 100% accessible across all learning environments and technologies.

Nicola is mother to creative and cheeky Sofia who has been hearing impaired since birth and wears bilateral hearing aids.

I am Silvie, mum to Elyana and Noah. Elyana is an aspiring marine biologist and surfer who became profoundly deaf at 3 and is a bilateral cochlear implant user. Noah lost his hearing at 4 and wears intergalactic hearing aids that he says help him with his skateboarding tricks!

It wasn’t until the start of lockdown that we as parents realised how inaccessible online lessons and online interaction were for our deaf children.

We saw our children struggle during live class time, online taught lessons, watching educational videos and trying to keep up with online social interaction. This gave us a personal insight into the challenges they face whilst learning and communicating with friends.

Now that deaf achildren and young adults are back in the classroom they are facing additional challenges on top of those previously present:

– MASKS preventing them from lip reading,
– social distancing and lack of visibility of the speaker,
– acoustics of the room and noise in the environment negatively impacting access to sound,
– rushed and poorly planned educational catch-up schemes.

If this carries on deaf children and young adults will miss critical learning!

It is recognised by educators that the pandemic has caused children to fall behind. Home schooling and disrupted access to specialist support has widened the gap between deaf and hearing peers. These shortcomings will lead to greater inequalities later on in life.

Something needs to change!!

It should be the government’s responsibility to make learning accessible to all children. However, until that happens, we as mothers have started a campaign called ‘Action for Captions’ https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/action-for-captions for an immediate difference!

We want to bring subtitles and live captions to all content in schools, colleges and universities by using cutting edge speech-to-text software. 

We believe by using specialist software in real time, text is always available in all learning environments: online, in the classroom, in lectures, in assembly and on a device at home.

We are aiming to raise as much money as we can to provide this software to as many schools as we can, but most importantly, we hope that this grassroots initiative kick-starts a national change.

We want the government and educational committees to get involved, to listen to the needs of deaf and children and young adults to make sure that education and learning is truly accessible.

Content makers and presenters will always need to consider the senses of their audience and we feel that this software will be a stepping-stone to a more accessible future. In an ideal world all content should be accessible to everyone!

Nicola and Silvie are founders of new charity Sound Waves Foundation (www.soundwavesfoundation.org), which aims to empower deaf and hearing impaired children and young adults by using technology to aid learning, experiences to feed passions and careers, and understanding to support deaf awareness and inclusion.