For students who are deaf and hard of hearing, access to online video instruction poses significant challenges. Remember, a teacher's voice can be heard, but may be difficult to understand.
Hearing Access:
- If possible, use a microphone/headset so that your voice is close to the mic, for greater clarity.
- Be mindful of the rate and intensity of your speech. Speak naturally, but clearly.
- Keep background noise to a minimum when teaching.
- Repeat peers’ comments, questions for everyone.
Visual Access:
- Speak with a full face view to the camera. (Avoid looking down; avoid hands near your mouth.)
- Be sure your face is well lit; avoid sitting where light (ex. a window) is at your back.
- Provide visuals to supplement auditory information.
- When reading a book aloud to younger children, a split screen mode will allow students to see the teacher's face for speech reading and the book.
Audio-Video Conferencing “Etiquette”:
- Have students mute their microphones; and unmute only when speaking to the class.
- Facilitate a one-talker-at-a-time rule.
- Encourage students to use a signal (ex. hand raising) and wait to be called on before they unmute.
- Teach students to be mindful of background noise in their own home environments.
Captioning. Remember: speech from videos is far less accessible than live voice.
- Third party captioning services provide the most accurate captions, and may be necessary for some DHH students. Automatic captions are imperfect, and may contain errors that distort meaning.
- Google Hangouts Meet provides automatic closed captions in real-time .
- Zoom does NOT offer free, real-time captions. However, your student can access automatic captions through a separate platform such as Web Captioner at their end during video instruction
- Offer pre-made videos with captions:
DCMP: Educational videos with captions
YouTube: Advanced Search Tool in YouTube will help in finding videos with captions (Filter > Features > Subtitles/CC). Be sure to preview videos to ensure caption accuracy
Teacher-Made Audios with Captions: