End-to-end accessibility services for the University of New Hampshire- IOD

The Institute on Disability (IOD) is a research university that undertakes innovative, academic, and dissemination initiatives to promote full access, equal opportunities, and participation for all persons in local, state, and national capacities by strengthening communities by promising practices, education and research. It focuses on the improvement of knowledge, policies, and practices related to the lives of people with disabilities and their families. The Institute is also the lead agency for New Hampshire’s statewide Assistive Technology Act program. 

Its center on inclusive education is a leader in the transformation of schools whose students with all abilities are successfully learning in their home schools within the general education settings. Thus, the IOD is a federally designated center authorized by the Developmental Disabilities Act. 

It all started when Janie Poncelet, the PCORI Research assistant in the Institute on Disability, reached CaptioningStar to support their events with live captioning for about 11 hours in two sessions and they also needed transcripts for the events. The conversation made us understand that the need of their hour was marketing their events. They were preparing brochures, forms, and flyers in English to highlight the importance of their group discussions but later realized that most of their target audience were Spanish speakers. Thus their brochures needed to be translated into Spanish to cover a broader spectrum of audiences. 

Considering their requirement, we associated with them even before the live event to provide translations for their documents. There were about 19 different documents in line for translation.  Apart from brochures and flyers, we were asked to translate their consent forms from English into Spanish as well. Each document was about 2 to 5 pages long, and we had to translate 15 different consent forms. Other documents had roughly 150 to 2000 words each. This was our cup of tea.

We employed bilingual translators to translate their forms from English to Spanish. We ensured to work on the files as early as possible because we know that the success of each event mainly depends on the number of participants. Thus upon confirmation, each file was translated into Spanish with the shortest turnaround time. 

Immediately after document translations, the live sessions were confirmed by Mila Bohlin, the Business Manager at IOD. As a part of their research study, they were to conduct a series of Zoom discussions on focus groups throughout the year. The agenda had back-to-back sessions for three consecutive days. They had planned to conduct them on May- July 2022 and August- November 2022. Thus, with around 250 participants, the event was trouble-free.  They understood that with live captions, everyone felt included. 

We walked them through our automated scheduling application iSchedule to enable easy scheduling of their events. Our Events Calendar gave them a clear idea of their events in order with the time. 

The research university completely entrusted us with the end-to-end captioning and translating needs for their qualitative research discussion. They required captioning in English. They also needed transcriptions and caption files. We always provide free transcripts for each session in .txt format and the caption files were delivered in .srt format. All the files were uploaded to dropbox in the shortest turnaround time.

We take pride in working with the University of New Hampshire in the transformation of the life of people with disabilities. The University was extremely pleased with our translation and captioning service. We are currently working on their next set of documents and translating them into Spanish. We will be working on the following focus group discussion that will be held in August-November 2022.