Practice and automation of remote real-time captioning support for students with disabilities using speech recognition technology

Real-time captioning is one of the effective support for ensuring the accessibility of lectures for students with hearing disabilities. Speech recognition technology is expected as a technology for automating real-time captioning support in higher education. However, the recognition rate of Japanese is often insufficient for hearing-impaired students to accurately understand the content of lectures in real time, and it is necessary to correct the misrecognition results. For this reason, the mainstream of real-time captioning support for hearing-impaired students in Japanese higher education is so-called PC note-taking, in which the supporter summarizes the content of the lecture and inputs it to a personal computer. We have classified the automation level by using speech recognition technology into four stages, and by optimizing the automation level for each class, we are gradually promoting remote automation of real-time captioning support at Hiroshima University from 2019. In this paper, we report on the practice of step-by-step automation of real-time captioning support at Hiroshima University, and discuss the advantages of the remote summary dictation we have adopted, including cost-effectiveness.