Live subtitling for access to education: a pilot study of university students' reception of intralingual live subtitles.

In the United Nations' Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, accessibility to education is mentioned as one of the areas where access has to be ensured. At the University of Antwerp, accessibility services are offered to individual students with a functional impairment; however, the offer does not include the use of new technologies yet, which hold a real potential for breaking down linguistic, physical as well as cultural barriers for a large and diverse student body. One such innovative technology is live subtitling, which can make lectures in large lecture rooms more accessible to all students who attend the class: not only deaf and hard of hearing students, but also students whose mother tongue is not the language of the lecture. The aim of this study is therefore to initiate research into the reception of intralingual live subtitles in an educational setting in Flanders, and in particular, to focus on the reception of intralingual live subtitles by first-year students attending a theoretical lecture in Dutch in a large lecture room. As far as the methodology is concerned, we will opt for a mixed-methods approach: an experiment and focus group discussions. The experiment will consist of two lectures in Translation Studies in Dutch, with and without intralingual live subtitles, attended by 150-200 1st-year students in Applied Linguistics. Student reception of the subtitles (perception and performance) will be investigated through an online questionnaire. Two focus group discussions will allow for the collection of additional qualitative data over perception.

Keywords:INCLUSIVE EDUCATION

Disciplines:Translation and interpretation sciences