Accommodations 101: Captions in the Classroom

Mar 8, 2022

Watching a movie during class is a fun experience—unless you don’t have access to what is being said due to a lack of captions. If you are an educator of deaf students, and others with audio processing disorders, and you are planning to show any kind of media during class time, you are responsible for including captions so that all students can participate. If you are a student, and you are struggling with classroom media that is not captioned, please contact us at [email protected] for support!

For more information on captioned media, please visit: https://www.nationaldeafcenter.org/ca….

Full video description: https://tinyurl.com/ms54ydjp

Video Description:

A light-skinned black deaf woman with short, brown curly hair sits wearing a black shirt and lavender sweater and matching dangly earrings. She uses ASL.

Speech:

When a film was shown without closed captions, I would ask the instructor if the video was captioned or not. When they indicated they didn’t know, I would ask them to please find out, because, without it, I can’t understand the film. They hadn’t even considered it.

One time, someone asked me if I could read lips, to which I responded, “yes and no.”

In their confusion, I clarified that I could read some words on people’s lips but that didn’t mean I could understand everything being said. Lipreading involves a lot of guesswork!

So, only when I ask if they have captions does it even occur to them. Even if a deaf character is on screen and they are using sign language, I still would ask for captions to be turned on because it forces them to rethink accessibility as a whole.

It forces them, in a nice way…it forces it to become the new normal.

Video Description:

As Ashlea fades, a teal circle with lettering overlaid appears: “Accommodations 101: Captions in the Classroom.”