Unheard Complaints: Integrating Captioning Into Business and Professional Communication Presentations

Abstract

This article explores pedagogical frameworks closely associated with d/Deaf and hard-of-hearing persons from the perspective of a disabled instructor to increase student awareness of the needs of diverse audiences they will encounter in the workforce. The author argues that students and instructors can use captioning theory to strategize one of the harder business communication genres, the presentation, for d/Deaf audiences to make communication more accessible. By raising critical awareness of the limits of technology, current trends in pedagogy, and disability, this article seeks to further the conversation about providing accessibility for disabled users in the classroom.

Keywords

deafness presentation captioning deaf and hard-of-hearing pedagogy

In late 2015, I was diagnosed with severe hearing loss tied to Alport syndrome, a medical condition that combines chronic kidney disease and the decline of hearing and vision. I have gone from being able to hear my students’ questions in 2008 to having to ask students to repeat themselves in a louder, clearer voice. I am finding that my international students are harder to decipher, probably because their differing speech patterns challenge my lip-reading skills. No doubt, my hearing loss is also limiting my effectiveness in assisting them until I have developed new coping mechanisms to respond to this situation. My students may be experiencing slight frustration because they do not understand why someone in their mid-30s has hearing issues. I am also frustrated because my ability to effectively communicate has been drastically reduced. In fact, as a part of my compensatory measures, I already find myself resorting more to using email instead of interpersonal rapport, using Word documents in class, and creating even more detailed documents for our course management system to account for potential questions I may not be able to hear. I no longer offer my cell phone number to students to call but instead ask them to text or email if they have issues with an assignment. Obviously, this reduces my ability to troubleshoot with them in a real-time environment.

My story is echoed byKerschbaum (2015), who has found that many disabled scholars at conferences often recount the same problem over and over with the narrative pointing toward disability seeming “to prevent such relationship-building between teachers and students” (Identifying and Analyzing Anecdotal Relations section, para. 1). While my feelings, as mentioned above, are grounded in professional fears and reinforced by the lore of the profession, there has been no significant divide or loss of relationship between myself and my students. Instead, there has been an understanding early on that I have issues with hearing and that we will find a way to engage with each other in order to learn from one another. Like Kerschbaum, I find that openly inviting conversations about access can be difficult because students may have a nonexistent, awkward, or secretive relationship with disability; nevertheless, building a relationship with students semester after semester and helping them understand the locus of where their assignment prompts come from has eased both their and my own relationship to disability. Talking through the legal language of theAmericans with Disabilities Act (ADA, 1990), explaining the impact it has on others’ lives, and working through assignments to show the social responsibility involved negate some of my own weariness about disability. By employing examples of my own experiences, working with students closely on their assignments, and showing how thinking about disability affects their own communicative efforts with others, both myself and my students open the doors to difficult conversations about how others access their work inside the classroom and within the workplace. Further, we engage in conversations about how students might like to approach business and professional communication with far more diverse audiences in mind than we may have otherwise.

To that end, this article discusses helping undergraduate students in U.S. universities understand that their assignments are more than just a simple exercise in workplace writing. Instead, the focus shifts to providing them with a framework to question their assumptions about ability and disability that will hopefully transfer into their future workplace practices. This pedagogy of access culminates in their final assignment, the formal presentation, where I shift them away from the able-bodied audience to a more realistic audience with diverse abilities to meet the requirements set forth in the ADA, with the hope that these experiences are relevant also to those outside the United States. My hope is for students to make further connections with different abilities and conceive of their potential and real audiences away from static representations of able-bodied users, much like themselves or bodies idealized in media and textbooks. My ultimate goal is to help students learn to make materials accessible for a range of bodies and not just the disabled users. I push for my students and myself to understand the need for flexibility in providing accessibility, problematize our relationship to whatDavis (1995)called “normalcy,” and recognize the complexity involved in creating deliverables useful for all bodies in the user-centered workplace. Much of this coursework is undertaken under the rubric of redesign, as it plays a large part in my original business communication course structure and allows me to address the disability gap in business and professional communication. AsOswal (2016)pointed out in the initial call for articles for this special issue, “Hardly any research on disability and accessibility has been published in the fields of business and professional communication” (p. 131). In fact, a cursory search of this journal provides only a smattering of references to disability since 1990, coincidentally the same year the ADA was passed. This situation is similar to whatKnight (2017)reported on the journal’s lack of attention to issues of social justice in general. Apparently, scholars in business and professional communication have not yet paid attention to the issues relating to disability and access in the presentation genre since no disciplinary research exists on the topic.

This article seeks to amend this oversight by focusing on the importance of prior research in disability, access, and captioning theory and how it can play a larger role in the business and professional communication classroom. In the following pages, I first offer a brief literature review of relevant scholarship on the topics of presentations and captioning while underlining the major research gaps regarding disability and accessibility in the former and highlighting the potential of the latter for business and professional communication pedagogy; then, the bulk of my discussion in this article centers on how to make presentations accessible both to instructors and students with disabilities. In this discussion, I regularly engage the published literature in greater detail to show how we can extend what we know about presentations and introduce what captions studies has to offer the business and professional communication discipline. Considering the predominantly aural nature of the presentation genre, the primary focus of this article is on hearing disabilities, though I include visual disabilities in my discussion when addressing presentational aids, particularly the subgenre of PowerPoint. Because the core purpose of this article is to strengthen our presentational pedagogy for inclusivity and broader audience reach, I support my analysis with an in-depth discussion of my own experimentation with accessible approaches to presentations in the classroom. I conclude by making a call for extending this pedagogical discussion about accessible presentations to larger academic venues, such as conferences and symposia.

Literature Review

Presentations in Our Textbooks

A central concern that needs addressing, the accessibility of presentations, comes from the textbooks used primarily in business communication courses: Textbooks in the field often forgo any discussion of disabled audiences in their rhetorical approaches to presentations. For example,Bovée and Thill’s (2017) Professional Communicationsnever acknowledges the need for any alteration to a professional presentation for any disabilities, much less the deaf, hard of hearing, or blind. The primary focus of their section on delivery highlights methods for relieving anxiety and handling questions instead of discussing how to meet the needs of diverse audiences. Likewise, Bovée and Thill suggested that handouts be used so readers can parse information on their own time, which is a valid recommendation but not one that is not inclusive of disabled audiences.Kolin’s (2017) Successful Writing at Workdoes not include disabled audience members in its diverse audience section or in its presentation section on identifying the needs of the audience.Peter Cardon’s (2016) Business Communication: Developing Leaders for a Networked Worldalso lacks any mention of disability and the needs of the disabled.Oliu, Brusaw, and Alred’s (2013) Writing That Works: Communicating Effectively on the Jobalso fails to mention adaptive presentations for disabled audiences, although the authors do spend some time on the design of accessible web pages for blind users.Bovée and Thill’s (2016a) Business Communication Essentials: A Skills-Based Approachconsiders age, culture, language, and comprehension of audiences; yet, like the other texts, it lacks any further discussion of presentation needs beyond creating graphics for slides.Business Communication Today, also written byBovée and Thill (2016b), briefly mentions disability bias in the workplace, though it lacks further explanation of how this might affect areas beyond interviews and employees’ day-to-day interactions. While these textbooks represent a relatively small sampling of what is available in the market, each text lacks a significant dialogue on the needs of the disabled, with the exception of web pages for the blind, which appears in the work ofOliu et al. (2013)andBovée and Thill (2017). Nevertheless, the needs of the disabled are generally invisible in these textbooks.

Missing Consideration of Disability in Presentations Scholarship

Problems of access erupt when we center approaches that privilege simplistic design over information in presentations. The movement away from PowerPoint in recent years, as advocated by scholars and professional writers (Bumiller, 2010;Schmaltz & Enström, 2014), has resulted in less information-dense presentations—those that frequently overuse bullets, graphs, and tables—favoring design-heavy concepts, simple images, and narrative as guiding forces. The conceptual, narrative-driven style is best illustrated in works such asDuarte’s (2008)influential bookSlide:ology, used as a model for presentation style in Penn State’s business communication course.Duarte’s (2008)approach encourages presenters to “allow the slides to enhance the story” (p. 244), which in turn privileges the spoken word and reduces the effectiveness of printed presentations, as the slides are mostly visual data without connected narrative.Reynolds’s (2008) Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation and Deliveryfollows a similar format by asking presenters to minimize the amount of text on the screen and instead use speech as the primary presentation tool. In similar vein toDuarte (2008)andReynolds (2008),Kedrowicz and Taylor (2016)posited that TED Talks help to effectively juxtapose thematically associative imagery with verbal information in presentations and emphasize evolving rhetorical norms. Likewise,Sherrow, Lang, and Corbett (2015)advocated for the use of TED-Ed lessons in the flipped classroom as a method that monitors progress and provides an alternate form of assessment that can be used prior to class time.

Narrative-driven, TED-Talks-inspired pedagogy is by no means an outlier among the communicative rhetorical strategies offered for presentations. McKee advocated for in-depth storytelling as a means to persuade audiences beyond just logic and rationality (as cited inFryer, 2003). Similarly, recent monographs highlighting the use of big data and data analysis, which are likely to merge with business and professional communication in the future, argue for the more widespread use of storytelling in presentations. Recent works (Knaflic, 2015;Lima, 2011;Wong, 2010;Yau, 2011) do little to highlight issues that affect d/Deaf viewers of data-analytic–based presentations.Knaflic (2015)is the only text that deals with memory and comprehension, although it fails to explore the issue of orality and comprehension for diverse audiences beyond a simplistic overview of short- and long-term memory. The spoken narrative, while important, only complicates accessibility for some disabled people because it privileges sound and memory first. At this moment, finding a balance that accounts for the needs of a multiplicity of disabilities is fraught with contradiction. When narrative replaces the visual, the d/Deaf are left out; however, when the visual takes primacy over the heard, the blind and low-vision suffer. Captioning presentations and video offers a balance to these contradictory positions as it allows for a variety of disabled persons to benefit.

Relevant Captioning Research

As the literature review presented here shows, with a larger push toward data analytics and storytelling, the necessity for captioning of presentations, both in real time and after the fact, looms larger and larger over the horizon. The need for captioning becomes even more vital as business programs continue to push for the introduction of analytics in lower division courses within the university.

Since the introduction of captioning for television in the early 1970s, its role in social integration of deaf persons has provided advocates and scholars with a wealth of discussion on its style, usage, and merit. Chronicling the use of captioning at WGBH Caption Center in Boston,Earley (1978)traced the center’s early attempts at captioning to meet the needs of deaf audiences and contextualized several problems still occurring today: time-reading captions, length of time on screen, and the integration of captions with visuals on screen.Braverman (1981)proposed a more robust selection process, screening for captioning involving rating scales, multilevel guidelines, and linguistic development.Blatt and Sulzer (1981)tracked the viewing habits of deaf survey participants and concluded that captioning had a significant impact on watchingThe Captioned ABC News. Unfortunately, by the late 1990s through the early 2000s, congressional investigations into the types of programs being captioned, specificallyBaywatchandJerry Springer, caused delays in increasing federal funding for access to captioned programming or removed support altogether, delaying vital improvement strategies (Strauss, 2006). The adoption of firm guidelines and standards continues to be a problem as digital technologies advance and their use becomes more ubiquitous. As of 2017, FCC captioning rules state that only content aired on U.S. television must be captioned once placed online and that live and near-live video must be captioned within 12 hours after initially airing, although it leaves out self-produced online content never appearing on television (Loftus, 2016).

The need for coherent guidelines continues to dominate global discussions concerning captioning as more countries seek to normalize standards across borders. Gallaudet’s Technology Assessment Program (TAP) offered a set of guidelines in response to newly developed televisions with built-in decoders in the hopes of providing standardized nonspeech information for use by captioning companies (Harkins, Korres, Singer, & Virvan, 1995). Research conducted outside of the United States has shared similar flaws with captioning standards.Neves (2008a)examined flaws in the assumptions of European and U.K. guidelines and found little standardization in their approaches to user needs. One vital point within the codification of global policies related to captioning standards involves training captioners in linguistic and translation studies to ease the needs of d/Deaf and hard-of-hearing users (Neves, 2007,2008b). AsLueck (2011)noted, sociolinguistic features of captioning—nonstandard English, accented English, or even English itself—complicate and create barriers for deaf viewers unaware of the rhetoricity of language while also reinforcing English-only standards. While the need for universal standards should be the first goal of captioning, the reality is that the field still does not have an adequate consensus on what works for users.

The pedagogical use of captions also has a long history within education and deaf studies that allows us to see beyond their use for entertainment programming. Studies focused on the comprehension ability of deaf children, young adults, and traditional college students revealed that captions did not adequately help with literacy learning, as most participants were not ready for complex captions, emotive captions, and, in general, the speed at which captions appear on the screen (Cambra, Leal, & Silvestre, 2010;Cambra, Silvestre, & Leal, 2009;Linebarger, 2001). Deaf and hard-of-hearing students presented with near-verbatim and edited captions did not report better comprehension of video either (Ward, Wang, Paul, & Loeterman, 2007).Kruger and Steyn (2014)observed that deaf, hard-of-hearing, and hearing students viewing the subtitles of academic lectures did not improve performance, although the authors felt that the combination of captioning and handouts competed for students’ attention. Extended experience with captioning, whether through the slow introduction of captions or with older students with a more nuanced understanding of captioned text and meaning, has led other scholars to believe the medium is an effective tool for learning.Collins (2013)concluded that the increased use of captioned videos and universal design for learning does improve the comprehension of marginalized college-aged students. Similarly,Lewis and Jackson (2001)explained that captioning helped to improve older deaf students’ understanding of vocabulary and syntax. However, few faculty in K-12 or higher education use captions in the classroom, understand legal requirements for captioning, and are aware of their benefits (Gernsbacher, 2015). One unifying conclusion stated in each of these studies is the need for more study on how assistive technologies may enable comprehension and increase literacy.

Adults’ use of captioning proves to be a bit more complex.Jensema (1998)concluded that age played no part in the comprehension of captions, though deaf users processed captions at a greater speed than their hearing peers. Understanding how deaf users comprehend, contextualize, and assimilate information proves contentious because captions seem to help with story comprehension but add little to the overall quality of perception of important concepts (Gulliver & Ghinea, 2003).Franco and Araújo (2003)asserted that deaf viewers need condensed speech captions instead of full transcriptions due to the need to process all information—visual and speech—on screen without delay.Burnham et al. (2008), however, tested text reduction and reading level on a population of adults and found that the ability to select a caption and text reduction rate suitable for the majority of users is most important. Reading patterns and dwell time also complicate captioning, as different users process information in different ways. For example,Szarkowska, Krejtz, Klyszejko, and Wieczorek (2011)found that deaf viewers were more likely to analyze the whole of a scene beyond the captions to understand context than their hearing and hard-of-hearing peers.

The aesthetics of captioning have been stagnant since its introduction despite user needs adapting to increasing technological innovations—Netflix, increased social media video integration, live streaming of news events online—since the mid-2000s (Rashid, Vy, Hunt, & Fels, 2008). The staid form of captioning, black background with white text overlain over images, provides a standard, consistent means of display. In that regard, it is still effective, but research over the last decade and a half has offered alternatives to plain captioning styles that allow for the expansive use of emotion in typography to augment the way that d/Deaf and hard-of-hearing users respond to text (Fourney & Fels, 2008;Malik, Aitken, & Waalen, 2009;Wang, Nagano, Kashino, & Igarashi, 2017). The use of kinetic typography, where the text itself is augmented to include emotion and tone, potentially offers these viewers a more immersive experience (Forlizzi, Lee, & Hudson, 2003). Similarly,Bodine and Pignol (2003)found that kinetic typography enhanced text-based messaging more than the traditional means. More recent uses of these forms can be found in the Facebook Messenger phone application where text and images are combined from keywords or emojis used by a sender (Paiva, 2016).

Little research on captioning of presentation materials in the classroom exists. The general lack of instructional techniques, theory, and substantive experimentation impedes our understanding of what practices might best inform the process beyond governmental regulations. Similarly, teaching students how to caption requires that instructors take into account several considerations, namely information density, readability, and meaning making. Deciding on factors such as kinetic typography, color of text, or other semiotic considerations might prove to be daunting to the novice student first learning how to caption materials. However, captioning-based projects can create a productive ground for upper-division undergraduate students to explore the relationship between text and the production of text, and to foreground how the accessibility aids in the meaning-making process for all learners. In particular, the types of empirical scholarship students conduct through applied research into captioning can offer highly applicable results for the pedagogy and practice of business and professional communication.Gambier (2003)recommended that students learning captioning focus first on information density.Talaván (2010)endorsed subtitling as a pedagogical tool that can improve comprehension of new or similar ideas. Because untrained students have been conditioned to pay attention to acceptable usage and mechanical writing strategies, their first instinct might be to refine text to proper grammatical conventions, which can lead to overcaptioning (Zdenek, 2015).Lueck (2013)asked students to consider the sociocultural rhetoricity of language as they listen, create, and evaluate their own self-produced captions.Beseghi (2014)recognized that students can act as translators and, thus, need to learn to adapt their skills in writing, proofreading, and meeting sociocultural norms of audiences. These experiments indicate that captioning curriculum in business and professional communication courses can serve several language-learning purposes.

Presentations Through the Ears and Eyes of Deaf and Blind Audiences

While presentations can require both oral and written linguistic comprehension for hearing listeners, they may also require viewers to decode body language.Doumont (2005)argued that nonverbal information—body language, hand movement, gaze—is integral to the way in which a speaker defines his or her ethos and emotional perception. Nonverbal information presents a problem for those with low auditory perception or those who utilize cochlear implants and hearing aids since they score lower in emotional perception than their hearing peers (Most & Aviner, 2009). Further study byMost (2016)revealed that people who develop hearing loss, or those with hearing loss who still use spoken language, focus on the mouth and miss otherwise useful paralinguistic information that would be displayed through posture, hand gestures denoting emphasis, or props. Thus, because we do not know the backgrounds of most of our audience, whether they have developed hearing loss early or late in life, we might ask students to avoid concentrating on using nonlinguistic elements such as body language or hand movements as a dominant fixture during their presentation.

Complicating these matters, TED presentations, modeled as a teaching tool, reinforce norms that may prove exclusionary or inadequate for disabled audiences. An issue that arises with TED-styled presentations comes from the stylistic imitation of the genre’s delivery that privileges passive engagement over active engagement in the speaker’s constructed talk. Passivity, in this specific case, stems from the conversational delivery that focuses less on nuanced information and more on expressing emotive language without the need to pay attention to the speaker on screen. Every semester, I have asked my business communication students to explain what makes these Ted Talks so appealing. The most common answer is that you do not have to actively watch them. Some students are drawn to the passive action of listening while doing other work at the same time. They are also drawn to the sense of speakers’ ethos, produced through the fast delivery, the dramatic urgency created by the tempo of these performances, and very often, the heart-wringing narratives woven into the text of the speech. We have no meaningful studies of the audiences’ understanding of the persuasiveness of these speeches.

While the techniques employed work for nondisabled speakers and listeners, the use of TED-style delivery fails when one is not able to make such an oral delivery or passively listen to the presentation. Likewise, transcripts of these talks can and do fail when students try to reproduce them because, from my own experience grading, students focus on the use of gimmicky rhetorical tactics as a panacea rather than providing information needed to convince an audience. Further complicating matters are TED’s licensed talks, TEDx—a ubiquitous format in usage on many college campuses in North America and abroad—where any regard for accessibility is rarely, if ever, given.Strochlic (2014)pointed out that TEDx, unlike its parent, skips accessibility in most cases, as it provides no postproduction captioning and favors verbal delivery without considering inclusivity of audience. This may have to do with the low-stakes nature of the TEDx genre, as it is rarely meant to be reproduced in video format and seeks to give exposure to seasoned speakers.

On the other hand, it is important to note that the people behind TED make an effort to crowdsource captions of their talks, although these are not immediately available to deaf users when a new presentation is posted to the website.Zdenek (2011)pointed out that the interactive transcriptions offered byTED.comprovide users access to specific words in the video through the search function. Likewise, this access through search function carries over into numerous language translations that volunteers create on the site for aiding nonnative English speakers, which might also be of help to deaf and hard-of-hearing users of these languages. The use of interactive, crowdsourced transcripts provides a possible model for engaging students with approaches that provide access for disabled audiences while avoiding word-for-word transcription. In a similar vein, having students study the captions provided on the TED website can allow them to critique the notion that presentation transcribing and captioning rely solely on the strict word-for-word translation of what is said. Instead, they are able to see that unspoken gestures and silences matter as much as spoken content in the construction of meaning. By reframing gestured delivery as a part of the presentation, we might also provide the opportunity to link our field’s origins in the classical rhetoric of Demosthenes and Cicero—both of whom stressed the use of looks and hand gestures for persuasion—to modern approaches to present a complete picture of public speaking that provides access for all participants (Corbett & Connors, 1999;Welch, 2001). In short, framing presentations as a multilayered, constructed practice can bring together verbal and nonverbal linguistic information in a way often overlooked by current presentation pedagogy in business and professional communication.

While scholars often advocate for the primacy of orally persuasive presentations and TED Talks offer a streamlined way of providing students with such an approach, these performances often lack components that unify disabled and nondisabled audiences. The adjustments I have so far suggested to this style to accommodate deaf and hard-of-hearing students and faculty can work even though integrating these adaptations into assignments might initially require added preparation time and effort. Likewise, students who are familiar with exclusionary simplistic delivery styles may not enjoy the extra work after being given a taste of less inclusive methods of delivery. Information-rich presentations, or at least ones that combine necessary information with visuals that help move the narrative forward, are beneficial training for students who need to understand the role written information plays for the hearing impaired. As university faculty, such academic instruction falls well within the purview of our civic duty as well as within our mission of fair and equitable higher education. Thus, it is important we allow for a move away from the singular use of oral presentations and promote inclusivity through the use of captioned presentations when possible.

Moving From the Oral Presentation to the Inclusive Captioned Presentation in the Classroom

To have my students better understand the needs of the d/Deaf and other disabled members of society, I began the course by focusing on what the ADA means in the workplace and why some of our assignments are geared toward meeting the federal guidelines, which also included an overview of Titles I, II, and III of the ADA as well as an explanation of how workplaces often ignore their implementation. A corollary to this introduction was the use ofPennsylvania State University’s (n.d.)settlement with the National Federation of the Blind (NFB) in 2012, as found on the university’s accessibility website (accessibility.psu.edu/nfbsusettlement/), which outlined the NFB and Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights binding agreement to assess, improve, and resolve accessibility issues on campus. By covering the ADA, including Penn State’s 2012 settlement and similar cases at UC-Berkeley and MIT, in as much detail as possible in class discussions, I hoped students would (a) become aware of federal regulations, including ones which do or may affect them in the workplace and (b) constantly adapt to the needs of the disabled as they completed assignments. More importantly, students were forced to rethink the ways in which they approach diverse audiences.

Audience awareness, a cornerstone of business and professional communication, should require more than having students think of a generic audience; in fact, if we were to center d/Deaf and hard-of-hearing audiences as one part of our assignment, we might better be able to have students recognize and create strategies for this group. AsOswal (2014)explained, we often see provisional fixes offered by technologies as the most basic solution to adapt to the needs of the disabled; however, these are only a start to offering accessible futures (p. 15). To fix this,Oswal (2014)recommended further implementation of participatory design as a solution wherein disabled users help with the development of accessible designs by working with teams of designers throughout the creation process instead of just end-result testing. Our classrooms may not offer much participatory design in terms of working directly with disabled adults or learners, although working within and throughout the local and university communities can offer direct ways in which we can test deliverables against the needs of real-time audiences.

Beyond Participatory Design for Captioning

Accessibility presents a myriad of other problems for deaf and hard-of-hearing students. The availability of certified sign interpreters in a given area restricts access to students, although the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (n.d.) projected a 29% increase in the number of interpreters between 2014 and 2024. Global access to interpreters of international sign language, in areas such as the European Union, Asia, and South America, follows the same pattern, as sign interpreters are often in growing demand with little availability. Even when interpreters are available, the issue of cost often precludes learning institutions from hiring enough part-time and full-time interpreters. Hiring communication access real-time translation (CART) is even more challenging due to its higher cost (Hood, Wood, & Jones, 1997). The CART service not only offers a real-time translation of presentations, but the process also results in a more-than-verbatim transcript of the orally delivered material both for deaf listeners and others.

The need for sign interpreters, or even individuals who understand the needs of deaf and hard-of-hearing students, in disability support services proves to be equally fraught with problems, as students are sometimes unable to properly communicate their needs to those who are directly involved in their transition to college (Johnson & Fann, 2016). As more disabled students enter college, factors such as budget cuts, tightened staffing in critical areas like campus disability services, and the limited allocation of resources will continue to exasperate this situation. We might witness problems in providing useful means to secure access and/or have opportunities to collaborate with the disabled to determine other best practices for ensuring access.

Developing and Managing Pedagogy of Access Projects in the Classroom

I am currently searching for a way to work with the deaf and hard-of-hearing community to add a real-world dimension to my assignments. This has proven difficult in many ways, as nonstudent deaf community members lack experience in working with human subjects and are unfamiliar with institutional review board procedures. Similarly, working with an already understaffed and overworked Office of Student Disability Services to provide outreach and find students willing to participate complicates matters further. Disability services at the universities where I have recently worked—Pennsylvania State University–University Park, Western Michigan University, and Midwestern State University—are vastly understaffed given the number of students they are required to serve. Compounded with the heavy course loads of many of my students, and the fact that many hold part- or full-time jobs, it would seem almost impossible to add in captioning or require students to work with community members. However, I have found that adapting assignments through microscale approaches of working with other departments helps to alleviate the strain of finding ways to provide access for the disabled. For example, working with a campus office of sustainability to create or revitalize existing items, such as flyers, videos, and other marketing materials, provides the needed foundation for many assignments because it allows me to mix already existing assignments with real-world documents. Similarly, collaborating with the agriculture department at Penn State University for a series of small marketing assignments, the Office of Sustainability at Western Michigan University, or the Small Business Development Center at Midwestern State offers students a way to develop materials that might aid low-vision readers and nonnative English speakers.

Most institutions, no matter the size, have available means of working with different departments or offices on campus to provide professional analysis of a problem and create meaningful deliverables that may be used in the future. While it may be difficult to find a large enough pool of disabled students, faculty, and community members whose direct needs might be met with a project, a cooperative partnership with another unit on campus enables students to work on complex projects that require a public-interest focus and open-endedness. Working on the needs of the disabled offers a unique chance in business and professional communication pedagogy for students to understand real audiences and practice creating purposeful deliverables (Verba & Perrault, 2016). Likewise, real-time, real-world design problems should help provide students with necessary experience that they might adapt to their future workplaces.

Captioning Technologies for Enhancing the Reach of Presentations

However much we strive to do better for our peers, we still must continue to do more work inside our classrooms so that we teach our students the habits of integrating and strategizing accessibility in all their activities. Two of the previously listed issues of access relate directly to how we approach the work we do in the classroom and how we ask our students to craft assignments. Presentations specifically tend to be the trickiest assignments to meet accessibility standards because they typically have been taught with an ableist approach, ignoring the user needs of the blind, d/Deaf, and others. In terms of hearing impairment, we have much to do as we rethink presentation assignments to help students understand their limitations both in and outside of the classroom.

One reason we need to do better at providing access at our professional conferences stems from the fact that methods used and innovations introduced by our peers can and should trickle down into classroom use.Zdenek (2011)noticed that the exclusion of captioning from our pedagogical discourse furthers the overall invisibility of disability and disabled people, a point that extends beyond the fields of writing studies and technical communication to business and professional communication (para. 5). Each semester, instructors are met with a new set of students with different needs requiring attention—whether the needs are visible or invisible at the beginning of each semester. Our awareness of each of these groups is challenged the moment we build what Zdenek termedableist pedagogies, which are built upon the notion that all students are able-bodied. This belief guides many classroom practices despite the growing number of students who are classified as in need of assistance or who have visible and invisible disabilities (para. 5). This perspective only reinforces the absence of deaf and hard-of-hearing audiences from our students’ view of audience, further reducing the awareness of audience members to single, confined groups.

WhileZdenek (2011)rightfully pointed out the lack of attention to disabled users, he also recognized that the act of captioning is not “simply a matter of copying dialogue from the script file to the caption track” as many might think (para. 7). Instead, the act of captioning is a negotiated process where the use of nonspeech sounds, possible background sounds or sound effects that are used to designate a sign used by the average listener, requires attention to whether or not they should be included. The rhetorical and contextual questionsZdenek (2011)posed—about overcaptioning, undercaptioning, subtitles versus caption, the manipulation of time, and nonspeech information—require attention during the captioning process. While each of these aspects is important for Hollywood movies, network television shows, and videos on corporate-run social media sites (as evidenced by the primacy of Facebook as a tool for forward-facing communication;Cho, Furey, & Mohr, 2017;Smith, 2017), they also present challenges to how captioning may be incorporated in presentations for business and professional communication courses. Instructors may not be able to or need to account for each of the matters Zdenek addressed, as a professional presentation may not need the same standards as a fluid, polished Hollywood film; for example, a presenter scratching his nose does not need captioning (overcaptioning) while the use of music should be acknowledged. Working on the timing and amount of captioning needed per video segment can be its own course. By simplifying the process through focusing on the clarity of the message, students can produce usable material while also gaining necessary experience.

Closing in on Captioning Pedagogy in Business and Professional Communication Assignments

One of the more traditional business writing assignments involves the canned, in-class presentation featuring slide decks and overly nervous undergraduates stressing about their grade. At Pennsylvania State University–University Park, these assignments take place at the very end of the semester, usually the last 2 weeks of classes after a longer assignment, a formal analytical report that connects three related assignments—the topic proposal, progress report, and presentation—is completed. Students and faculty perceive the presentations as a quick assessment that reduces the pressure of high-stakes grading. However, the traditional oral presentation leaves much to be desired in terms of accessibility. A proposed switch is simple enough, especially for the benefit of students and faculty with hearing impairments, as students record their presentations and upload them to YouTube or another media platform.

Another method used to create accessible materials for presentations follows the multimedia composite approach ofMiyamoto, Arakawa, and Takizawa (2007), which uses audio, captions, and slide-deck materials created through IBM CES studio. Software such as Adobe Animate CC allows for the creation of captions with video in FLV and Flash. YouTube’s automatic captioning function can also be substituted for CES studio. Based on their surveys of senior citizens and the disabled,Miyamoto et al. (2007)found that their respondents saw the composite approach as useful for all ages in the learning process. Of special interest to this study was the use of speaker notes in presentation software that allows for either separate notes to be hosted alongside the presentation or for captioning software to create captions from the notes themselves. The use of the composite approach (notes, captions, and a slide deck) can be beneficial for real-time classroom environments as well, though students may find it time-consuming. However, the practice of recording, editing, adding notes, and captioning presentations can and should serve students well for future endeavors when they are tasked to do so in work environments.

By creating captions for their speeches, students can gain useful skills in the manipulation of language to meet the needs of specific or general audiences. AsLueck (2011,2013) pointed out, students’ exposure to their own thought process when writing captions allows them to better see how they conceive of language. The process of moving from video presentation, an often sterile undertaking, to a resource like YouTube’s auto-captioning can allow for necessary rhetorical growth as students learn to consider a wide range of audiences when editing rather than just a nebulous “professional” one. By considering disabled students as part of their audience and providing captioned audio of their presentations, students can rethink the needed language for all parties rather than just those assumed to be able-bodied. This attention to user needs provides a firmer basis for bringing in disabled users as part of the overall conversation.

Less explored in business and professional communication is the understanding of how captions can play a part in videoconference recordings and interviews. With the Skype interviews replacing phone or face-to-face contact, students often are frustrated at some of the realities they face when they are put in front of a webcam for the first time. Even practice through a medium like YouTube may help solve this issue by positioning them in an environment where they need to think of not only their physical representation but also how they are represented through their language use and captioning. Having students record a mock interview and upload it to YouTube, run auto-capture, and display the results may help them understand their own physical and linguistic limitations and improve upon errors such as body language, interrupters (for instance, uttering “um,” “er,” and “uh”), or nonspeech information such as frantic movement.

Captions in the Classroom: A Test Run

While the undergraduate business communication classroom may not always be the ideal space to focus on specific aspects of disability law, instructors can engage students in discussions about the implications of these laws to their business and professional communication work. Having students work with particular genres of writing—memos, topic proposals, long-form reports, and so on—that need to meet ADA compliance standards might help students understand how the standards apply to the workplace. For example, instructors can make students aware of how ADA addresses disability in separate spheres of work—be it accommodations in state and federal sites (Title II) or public accommodations required in private business (Title III). For this purpose, I have developed an assignment where students are tasked with responding to a customer complaint.

The Wronged Customer Case

The students’ employer has received an email from a disabled customer who felt she was discriminated against by this business. The students are given access to the ADA’s webpage (www.ada.gov) and directed to Title II to learn about the rights of disabled citizens in the United States. They then draft two documents: first, a memo to their direct superior asking if there are any ways in which they could accommodate this person in the future and, second, a response to the customer. These faux interactions are meant largely to inform them of steps to be taken in the workplace and demonstrate what it is like interacting with a customer base who feels harmed.Jones (2017)shared the importance of students engaging in authentic experiences based on real-world issues that help them gain transferable skills. However, the larger goal of this assignment was exposure to ADA rules on accommodation so that students are aware of their responsibilities. Even those who come through the course with previous business law coursework under their belt rarely have realized that ADA compliance is part of their business duty.

The activities described above are quite simple, as they require students to follow one conventional format, the memo, to gain guidance on how to handle a situation. This is housed within the fourth assignment of the course and is part of three other mini-assignments which stress understanding the rhetoric of communication in a variety of modes—interpersonal email, a formal progress report, and a bad news email. As many of my former students partake in internships the semester after taking my course, the goal is to give them experience dealing with an uncommon, though necessary, function of their job and drafting a response that could be used as a strategy for managing customer complaints. The assignment is written as follows:

You are an intern in charge of public relations for [insert city name] Water and Waste Department.

You have recently been contacted via email by an employee of the local Chamber of Commerce, Susan Monk, with a concern regarding your city’s Water and Waste website. Ms. Monk has received complaints that the website cannot be read by a screen reader and lacks easy access to information on the sidebar.

You would like to be able to respond to this, but you are not familiar with what she is asking for since you are just a college intern. Before you can answer Ms. Monk, you will need to seek guidance from your supervisor on how to proceed.

In this email query, your challenge is to restate Ms. Monk’s complaint and provide guidance on what needs to be done and how to proceed. Similarly, you will need to ask how to respond to any future customer complaints about accessibility issues as to better connect with customers who might not be able to access information as easily.

Asking the students to pivot from a specific problem, the inability of a screen reader to read a website, gives them a point of reference from which they can address their concern. Second, using a design feature, such as sidebars, as a corollary point helps provide further information for them to think about. These are purely meant as ways for students to perceive a problem most of them ordinarily do not encounter in their own daily lives, as the majority use the Internet without assistance. Next, I ask students to draft a response to any of the customers affected by these problems to allay any fears or prove that the problem has been addressed. Often, students are reticent and ask for assistance with this portion because they want the terminology to reflect that they are addressing the situation with care. I try to turn this student hesitation into a teaching moment where both the students and I can collaborate as a group on the best ways to address consumer needs and respond in a way that does not presume their audience’s abilities, although this would be better if we could test these responses with disabled users. The situation also permits me to move students beyond the “sensitivity for the disabled” attitude to the “disabled service user as a customer” position.

Recently, I conducted a test run of using captioning software in a Summer 2016 business communications course of 11 students at Penn State. Before beginning the presentation assignment, the previous 2 weeks were spent reading and discussing how to write and design formal reports for a wide range of audiences, including blind, deaf, and other disabled persons, using ADA guidelines. The purpose was to introduce students to captioning software using Adobe Captivate, which was preloaded in every computer lab throughout the university, or YouTube depending on the student’s level of comfort; however, they were given the choice to abstain from captioning if they felt uncomfortable. This produced only one positive result, as a single student, who was the most comfortable with Adobe Captivate, exhibited her final presentation with captioned text using prerecorded video. Her peers were less receptive to this approach, though they admitted to avoiding Adobe because it would have taken much longer to learn on their own. Three students attempted to work with YouTube’s captioning software but quickly abandoned the project because they felt it was too time-consuming for a fast-paced summer course. Despite this poor participation in learning access technology, there is still hope for more work to be done in the future for students to adapt presentations for all audiences.

Given the reduced time available for homework in a summer term, it was nearly impossible to squeeze in all the necessary elements of captioning and editing a presentation; however, in a regular semester this could prove easier, as there would be enough time and hopefully available software to adequately cover issues of captioning and put them into practice. I believe there would be more volunteers than there were in the summer semester trial due to extended time and available user-friendly software. Yet what would prove more important is access to software that would not need its own full-credit class to learn. Current speech-to-text software, while easy to use, only has 70% to 80% accuracy in translation (Louder, Tapp, Philippe, & Loft, 2006). Additionally, many programs such as Amara, Handbrake, and Camtasia, while inexpensive, take some technical knowhow that students may feel uncomfortable with undertaking (Louder et al., 2006). This leaves YouTube as my preferred choice due to its accessibility, zero cost, and familiar interface design. Because of its ubiquitous market presence, it can give students an easy venue to experiment with editing their own presentations.

Access to these and other tools, whether IBM CES or Adobe Animate, can also be difficult, as many universities do not have adequate budgetary earmarks or classroom space available. YouTube’s closed-captioning and subtitling option (https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2734796?hl=en) provides the best possible solution to these constraints since it is free to all users, although it does take time for new users to learn to adequately use it. A secondary function is the auto-captioning technology already available to YouTube users. This allows users to forgo lengthy transcription and time coding in favor of a quickly transcribed video; however, these captions need to be revised by students, as they are often fraught with errors. While this may seem inopportune, such errors can be used to highlight how machine translation, or even literal translation on site, can and does elide important linguistic information while also creating comical mistakes in the text displayed. Highlighting the errors in auto-captioning also provides an opportunity to foreground the limitations of automated technologies and the role of human intervention in such situations. AsLueck (2011)pointed out, the act of translating speech into text can provide an experiment for students to edit and recast a caption in a variety of ways using more accessible language for diverse audiences. By editing the automated caption, students can gain a sense of agency in how they and their peers interpret and translate text.

While students might think more about the text on screen and whether it makes grammatical, syntactical, and mechanical sense, they often think less about the users of what they are producing. They might conceptualize the average user of their presentation as a fellow student and solely base their production and evaluation of text captions on their needs. This belies the need for usability as it produces a limited scope that denies the essential interaction between users and the product (Suojanen, Koskinen, & Tuominen, 2015). It is important to stress to students that literal meaning may not fit all viewer needs or capture all context. Even more, it is best not to crowdsource captions within the classroom, as the intended meaning of their message might not be conveyed properly. Likewise, it is important for students to realize that they cannot and should not overcaption materials no matter how important they perceive linguistic and nonspoken information to be (Udo & Fels, 2010). Instructors should remind students to use their best judgment if they feel confused by what needs to be included, whether to use literal or interpreted meaning, or how long a caption should stay on screen. Students can then test out this material on peers or by working with campus support services to locate deaf students to volunteer to test material; however, students should not expect that every deaf individual would be willing to participate.

The use of video presentations in the classroom is not without merit, as it allows for deeper connections with workplace activities that may arise in postuniversity careers. The focus on audience aids students in understanding the limitations, whether oral or visual, of a growing workforce population. By designing classroom presentations to meet the needs of several types of disabled audience members, including the elderly who can easily develop hearing problems, they will be able to combat ableism inside and outside the workplace by ensuring that materials meet the needs of actual prospective clients. In the last 8 years of teaching business and technical communication, my students have never brought the awareness of disability from other courses into their schooling; hence, a business and professional communication course is a fitting venue for learning these lifetime skills to meet the needs of approximately 15% of the world’s population. As instructors and mentors, we have been given the responsibility of preparing students for life; therefore, it is appropriate that we constantly remind them that professionals are sometimes tasked with creating in-house training materials for new employees, marketing materials for conferences and trade shows, and other documents intended for audiences with a broad range of abilities. The benefit of students learning to think and act upon the needs of the disabled early on will, no doubt, result in creating a new normalcy (i.e., one that does not exclude the needs of diverse audiences and has them rethinking and reconceiving their projects to provide access beyond their imagined sense of their own discourse community).

Conclusion

As I wrap up this discussion, I want to remind all faculty that the presentations at our own professional conferences are not immune to issues of inadequate accessibility for participants with disabilities. Most conference presentations fall short of guidelines outlined by disability advocates, or they do not even heed disability. Of specific concern to disabled scholars are a lack of captioned keynote speeches and presentations and a severe lack of interpreters on site. For non–hearing-impaired members, site-specific problems with maneuverability severally hamper blind and motorized assistive devices as well as inoperable phone apps for conference programs. Such criticism has not significantly trickled down into the literature of business and professional communication or in graduate classroom practices unless specifically asked for by disability services offices for a particular student enrolled in the program. This is despite the fact that the California State University, Northridge Assistive Technology Conference, the National Federation of the Blind, the National Federation of the Deaf, and Gallaudet University have provided extensive guidelines and advocacy for the best practices in using assistive technologies vital to how we present materials. It is imperative for us to adopt standards that mimic our attempts in our own professional sphere by using what is available to us in the absence of expensive tools such as CART. If nothing else, this will make professionals aware of the variety of assistance available and needed for the disabled.

In sum, the need to expand business and professional communication’s recognition of the disabled in our own academic conversations is paramount as our student populations continue to change, the needs of their postacademic workplaces require more accommodations for their peers and clients, and our own ability to encounter audience shifts. This not only echoes the call for substantive conversation and enactment of pedagogical shifts in this special issue but also urges instructors to replicate these conversations with students in our classrooms. While captioning is just one possible component of aiding students or preparing them for workplace legal requirements, we should and need to continue extending our scholarship to promote access beyond able-bodied individuals as the primary focus and incorporate nuanced discussions of the needs of ever-changing audiences. Despite the perception that the modern student is a digital native ready to undertake any technological challenge, just like many faculty, they may be reticent to adapt or expand their own practices to meet new objectives concerning the disabled. However, this does not mean that such goals are impossible. Despite possible objections from some students, my classes have been receptive to learning about captioning and ADA requirements, though their discomfort with technology sometimes prevents them from engaging further with tools used to meet accessibility standards. Thus, their resistance is neither to captioning nor to disability; it is caused, in fact, by the lack of user-friendly learning technologies on our campuses.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

This article would not have been possible without the diligent assistance of Sushil Oswal and the encouragement of Victoria Smith.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Author Biography

Geoffrey M. Cleggis an assistant professor of business and technical writing in the Department of English at Midwestern State University.

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