The Office for Students with Disabilities (OSD) tries their very best to make the college experience for disabled students on an even keel with that of “abled” students.

As a deaf student, I was provided with notetakers. These notes were provided by both students in the same class and those whom typed the lecture using a translating set-up called C-print consisting of two laptops connected by wireless link. The hearing typist would type on one and whatever he or she entered would appear on the computer in front of me.

Lectures were supposed to be typed verbatim and, to ensure the typing to proceed at a faster rate, shortcuts could be used. For example, “bkz” was “because” and would instantly turn into that word on the student’s laptop screen.

This would have worked out well if all the typists were familiar with the software. Instead of professionals, graduate students were hired, and they usually got a crash course in the C-print software before being sent out. In addition, despite being grad students (and most likely having already typed some hundred research papers), many of them were slow typists. They were usually still being trained in how to use the program while typing a course for the students that depended on them, and they would practice using the shortcuts while the lecture was going on, ergo, wasting time. UP staff meetings, extracurricular events and classes (obviously) were not always as informative as they should have been.

I had been told that I was missing important things in my lectures, funny anecdotes and heated class discussions. I believed it because I saw that almost all of my typists would type shorter versions of long explanations. Just because a person can’t hear doesn’t mean they don’t realize they’re not getting everything. Deaf not blind, what should have been a rule of thumb, is a good point to keep in mind.

I once had a typist brag to me that she could get a 15-minute discussion into 10 words. That enraged me so much; I made a beeline for the director’s office to complain after class let out.

A few years later, I asked the OSD if they could provide a typist for UP staff meetings. They did, and I thought I was privileged to get this extra service since they don’t normally assist in translating extracurriculars. The person typing for me turned out to be so bad I fired him after three weeks. He had no knowledge of the C-print program at all (the first time he even asked me how to set it up!) and typed so slowly he got a total of 10 words in 20 minutes. These people just did not seem to understand. I didn’t want summaries; I wanted the details I wasn’t getting.

I know I should have spoken out more. I should have complained to the point of becoming annoying when things were not working and encouraged others using C-print to do the same for translators who were not working for them. I didn’t. Not because I was scared of hurting feelings or breaking hearts (honestly, I couldn’t give a fart in high wind if a student aspires to be the greatest typist on earth-if he sucks, I’m going to tell him so), but because after one has complained about the same thing so many times and there just doesn’t seem to be any progress being made, it becomes a bit tiresome. As a journalist, that’s not a great path to take. As a disabled student who can miss a lot when not looking (I read lips, so that’s not figurative), it’s even worse.

I had told the OSD of another translating set-up for the deaf called CART (Communication Access Realtime Translation) time and time again. It works in basically the same way C-print does: the shortcuts are the same and the set-up is almost the same. The big difference is that the hearing person is a professional court stenographer. The budget they are given may not allow for the office to hire a professional typist, but the department of education determined that CART was such an important service, they even offered to pay for half the costs at one time; so it wasn’t as if the OSD would have been paying huge sums. The OSD made a weak attempt at contacting the CART provider that I knew, and then gave up after they weren’t able to get a hold of him by phone.

CART is offered to the hearing impaired population at USF. I know this for fact because I’ve talked to the disability director there in person. I almost jumped for joy when he told me the services available. Food for thought: both are schools in the state university system. Why would one school offer something determined to be an “important service” and the other wouldn’t? I’m sure the OSD at FAU does the best they can, but sometimes, the best just isn’t good enough.