NTID Lands $400K Grant

The National Technical Institute for the Deaf at Rochester Institute of Technology has been awarded a $400,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Education’s Steppingstones of Technology Innovation for Students with Disabilities program.

NTID Researcher Michael Stinson will be leading the two-year project to build on progress made at NTID over the last several years to create educational tools to support mainstreamed deaf and hard-of-hearing students at middle and high school levels.

The main goal is to develop a new tablet PC-based approach to notetaking, which will enable students to not only view notes on their own tablet that are taken by another notetaker whose tablet communicates wirelessly with the students’, but allow the students to add their own notes, as well.

A second goal is to develop a method for incorporating use of a tablet with C-Print, a speech-to-text real-time translation system developed by NTID and now found in educational settings and business meetings nationwide that involve people who have hearing loss, visual impairments, or learning disabilities. The new method will allow a C-Print captionist to either use a tablet or an external electronic pad to provide graphical information along with the predominantly text-based real-time display for students. In addition, students will be able to mark the text of the real-time display produced by the provider or add notes on their own tablet.

The project will also develop online and printed guides for using these support options and conduct research to determine the potential usefulness of these tools to support students.

NTID is the first and largest technological college in the world for deaf and hard-of-hearing students. One of eight colleges of RIT, NTID offers educational programs and access and support services to the 1,100 deaf and hard-of-hearing students from around the world who study, live and socialize with 14,400 hearing students on RIT’s Rochester, N.Y., campus. Web address: www.rit.edu/NTID.

For more NTID News, visit www.rit.edu/ntid/newsroom.