Leaders in education and vocational rehabilitation (VR) met throughout the summer and fall in Engage for Change | state (EFC) online regional meetings organized by the National Deaf Center on Postsecondary Outcomes (NDC) — determined to advance their short-term pandemic response and proactively create long-term strategies to improve services, support, and outreach to deaf youth.

With the rapid shift to online learning due to the pandemic, many colleges and schools are relying upon automatic captions as a quick and cheap way to convert spoken words into text for deaf students in classrooms, events, and extracurricular activities.

While this type of automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology may be effective for Alexa — to ask your home device to make a grocery list or set a reminder — it is a sub-standard option in educational settings and can have costly repercussions for institutions.

For deaf students attending high school and preparing to enter college or careers, COVID-19 is adding uncertainty to a time that, while exciting, is already challenging.