DeKALB – A captioning service offered by NIU allows students with hearing disabilities to participate in classes alongside their peers. 

The Communication Access Realtime Translation service (CART) is offered through the Disability Resource Center. The service brings accurate captioning to students with hearing impairments. 

Pam Wixom, NIU’s lead CART captioner, has been working for NIU for 21 years. She explained that aside from videos that need to be captioned for asynchronous classes, everything is done in real-time. 

“Everything we do is live,” Wixom said. “We work remotely. I’m at home, the student is in the classroom, and it’s still instant.” 

To accomplish this, professors in classrooms with a student who needs captioning services wear a microphone. Captioners listening to the audio use a stenographer machine and captions appear on a laptop or tablet for the student. 

The captioning service also allows students with hearing disabilities to participate in group discussions. 

“The professors that are really working with us will take the microphone over to the group so that the new group then has the microphone so we can hear what’s being said, or they’ll pass the mic around,” Wixom said. “That’s very helpful for us so we can hear everybody instead of just the professor.”

Captioners are tested by the state of Illinois to show they can type at 225 words per minute with 98% accuracy. Wixom said this accuracy is what makes human captioning more valuable to students than automated captioning. 

“The human just does a better job at it,” Wixom said. “The automated captions can have some really bad things that come out for the students and then that’s not equal access.” 

CART is a free service provided to students who qualify. 

Students that need captioning services can fill out a request form on the NIU Disability Resource Center website.