Making Arrangements for Students Approved for ASL/CART Services

Students approved through the Office of Disabilities Services (ODS) will provide you a Letter of Accommodation indicating they require American Sign Language (ASL) or captioning for their lectures. Typically, you will receive an email from the ODS prior to this, asking for information to enable them to make appropriate arrangements for your course.

While there are a number of automated tools, in these cases, the ASL interpreter and all captioning is outsourced by ODS to a live person. This ensures accuracy of the captions.  All partnering agencies should review our Information for Vendors providing ASL/CART Services.

Below is information instructors need to ensure things are set up appropriately, based on their course needs

Live Conferencing with live captioning

Regardless of the conferencing tool you are using (i.e Zoom, WebEx, BigBlueButoon, BlackBoard Collaborate, etc), our agencies will be able to provide live captions. This is done through a third-party site which the student and captionist will communicate on. You will not see the live captions appear on the conferencing tool you are using. 

Once the captionist has been arranged, they will set up a guest NETID, and we will provide you with that information. We ask that you please add that person to your class roster in your online site (i.e Canvas, Sakai, Blackboard). This will enable them to get access to what ever conferencing tool you are using.  Please note, in some cases (as with Blackboard) you will need to reach out to your course admin to have this individual added to your site.

Live Conferencing with a Live ASL Interpreter

Not all conferencing tools (i.e Zoom, WebEx, etc) has the ability to integrate a Live ASL Interpreter.  Below are the most commonly used live conferencing tools and the instructions for how to set up this service. Regardless of which you are using, please let ODS know so we can coordinate effectively with our agency. As with Live Captions (see above), we will provide you with the NETID of the interpreter. Please be sure to add this individual to your online site (Canvas, Blackboard, etc).

• Setting up ASL in Zoom- Recommended
• WebEx- There isn't an easy way to provide this. If you are utilizing WebEx, please let us know.
• BigBlueButton- You are unable to provide an ASL Interpreter in BigBlueButton. If you are utilizing this, please let us know.

Closed Captioning for Video Content

(i.e. recorded lectures, YouTube Videos, etc. )