For some students who have hearing difficulties, simple things many people take for granted, such as attending a sporting event, can be an isolating and frustrating experience.
This is exactly how Anais Keenon@@CE@@, a University “hard-of-hearing student,” described her previous experiences at Autzen Stadium after having difficulties hearing the game commentary.
“I could still follow the game and scores, but it seemed I was missing a lot of the chatter around the players and the coaches and the field,” Keenon said in an email.
After the game, Keenon asked her father and brother — who were at the game with her — if they would have enjoyed the game as much if there was no commentary. When they agreed that hearing the announcer’s voice would make a difference in how invested they were in the game, Keenon said she “felt frustrated and excluded from some important conversations.”
“People never think that what they’re saying is important,” Keenon said. “I can’t tell you how many times I heard the sentence, ‘But you can still follow the game; the commentary isn’t that important,’ but I promise that if you’re hard-of-hearing or deaf, it makes a world of difference to us.”
However, for Keenon and others with hearing difficulties, such experiences may be a thing of the past now that the University has joined others, such as Arizona State University, to provide open captioning at sporting venues.
“I think it’s an enormous step forward,” Clark Anderson, the vice president of the Oregon Communication Access Project@@http://comm.uoregon.edu/archive/news-release/2011/9/uo-captioning-fans-autzen-stadium@@, said. “When you retrofit for captioning, it’s a big deal. The University cannot only provide a model, but also assistance to other universities.”
The open captioning, which began nearly a month ago, features in-stadium announcements by Don Essig@@http://www.naspaa.net/viewClinic.php?c=35@@ and game officials, as well as programming voice-overs during play stops that are displayed as text on Duck Vision. Mike Duncan@@confirmed in directory@@, the Senior Associate Athletic Director for Facility Operations and Events, said that while there were initial equipment costs associated with getting the open captioning installed, the costs are worth sharing the experience with those who have hearing difficulties.
“I think that it definitely provides an opportunity for them to enjoy games in a way that they may not have been able to previously,” Duncan said. “As we do more events, especially in the arena, and we learn more from people about their experience, we will always be looking at ways to make things better.”
The effort to provide open captioning at University-sanctioned events at both Autzen Stadium and Matthew Knight Arena began way before the construction of the Matthew Knight Arena even commenced. At that time, Anderson, who spearheaded the effort, went to a meeting on behalf of the University’s athletic department with the Hearing Loss Association of Lane County@@http://www.cochlearcommunity.com/oregon/weblog/1640.html@@ to discuss various ways to assist those with a wide range of disabilities.
In July of 2009, the University proposed the use of hand-held devices to help those with hearing difficulties, but that solution was rejected a year later after tests yielded various flaws. This past May, Anderson said the University’s athletic department openly committed to providing captions at many public, school-owned venues, including Autzen Stadium, P.K. Park, Matthew Knight Arena and Hayward Field.
“Providing captions makes a tremendous difference to us, because we would not be able to understand what is being said,” Anderson said. “Even those people who do not have severe hearing loss have a very difficult time hearing speech in background noise. As you may expect, at athletic events there’s a heck of a lot of background noise; most of us cannot even hear the announcements.”
In fact, Anderson said the use of open captioning may be useful now that the amount of those with hearing difficulties is steadily increasing. According to a 1999 study by the National Academy of an Aging Society 22 million Americans, or roughly 8 percent of the general population “have hearing which may vary from mild loss of sensitivity to total loss of hearing.”@@www.agingsociety.org/agingsociety/pdf/hearing.pdf@@ In the same study, more than 10 million Americans reported that they had some form of hearing loss that presented difficulties in hearing normal conversation.
Although she has not had the chance to see a game at Autzen Stadium since the open captioning was installed, Keenon said she is now excited about going there to see another Ducks game.
“This is an enormous step by the University,” Keenon said. “It’s a recognition that hard-of-hearing and deaf people ought to have the same access to spoken information as anyone else does. Among the fans, there are thousands who benefit from this technology, and this action is the University finally acknowledging us and asserting that our right to information and our right to enjoy all aspects of the game are just as imperative as anyone else’s.”