d/Deaf and hard of hearing resource development (input needed!)

Competition Team Organization
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Hi! I’m Paige, I’m from FRC team 766, I’m hard of hearing and I’m working on developing some resources for students and teams to make FIRST more accessible for d/Deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) students like me. I love FIRST but the loud and chaotic environment of robotics shops and competitions can be uniquely challenging for me and other DHH students.

My hope is to get input from other students and use that along with my own experiences to create written materials with best practices, helpful accommodations, and ideas to make FRC teams more accessible. They’re intended to be helpful both for deaf and hard of hearing FRC students and for teams that want to create a more accommodating space.

I’ve made a google form and attached it to this post, so if you want to help contribute to the project or receive the finished product please fill it out!

The primary goal of the form is to collect information from other people about what they’ve struggled with and what helped them most. I have a good bit of experience myself, but I’ve only experienced FRC from the perspective of my own hearing loss, my communication mode, and my team environment. In order to make this more helpful for more people, I need more varied input. So, if you are a DHH FIRST student or have had a DHH student on your team, please fill out the form so I can get your perspective and ideas!

If you or your team is interested in getting a copy of the resources once I finish them, please fill out the form and indicate that.

One of my teammates also made a really cute button for me to wear at competitions that said “Hard of Hearing” on it, and I found it really nice and helpful in interactions with other teams and judges in the pits because it made them more aware that I might not hear them well and reduced confusion. We have the file for the button design and would be happy to share it if anyone is interested. You can also mark that on the form and I’ll send it over to you.

Please message me or comment on the post if you have any questions or issues or want to share anything related to this project!

Thanks so much to anyone who’s willing to help or share this with others who might want to help or might want to receive the finished resources, I really appreciate it!!

Here’s the form: https://forms.gle/hSyiaJnvtXC9J2xV6

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Hi Paige!

I’m a mentor with 6328 and frequent event volunteer, am 100% deaf in one ear and have mild-moderate hearing loss in the other so know exactly where you’re coming from. I also served for several years on FIRST’s accessibility advisory committee (currently inactive, sadly) to advocate for D/HH participants and work for a nonprofit dedicated to supporting families with kids who are D/HH (www.decibelsfoundation.org).

I am here to support this project, provide resources, make suggestions, etc. I will fill out the form but also happy to chat offline. If you use DMs, please make sure to include one of your team mentors as another adult.

Katie

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I attended RIT, which has an NTID program on campus and around 10% of students are deaf/HOH. There are some resources for non-HOH instructors on this page that could possibly pass along to mentors: RADSCC - Resources | National Technical Institute for the Deaf | RIT

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Thank you so much for helping with this and also everything else you’ve done! I’m working on this and also another project, and I definitely might reach out at some point to get your feedback or help with them.

Also good reminder about YPP, I’ll be careful about that as well.

Again, thank you so much :slight_smile: !

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That’s awesome! These pages look super helpful, I’ll definitely check them out and incorporate some of the information.

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There’s some teams listed here from a few years ago: Deaf Ed Members on FRC/FTC Teams

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Thank you!! I’ll look through that thread and reach out to some of the teams that are mentioned there.

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I saw the title and came here to share the exact same information, but you beat me to it!

RIT/NTID has some excellent resources for this!

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Thank you for doing this. One of our students on our FTC team (moving to FRC next year) is also hard of hearing. She started on the team 3 years ago and as a coach (but not a teacher) I struggled to try and figure out different things we could do to accommodate her. Especially at Events. We were a big advocate for subtitles (a minimum for FIRST in my opinion) and we’re so happy to have that now.

Because I wasn’t a teacher, I wasn’t even aware of what WAS already available. (Such as microphones that connect directly to a students implant) Having a resource that even basically lists different accommodation techniques and technology would have been a huge help. (Lucky CD is also a huge help) Also, since not every person is the same, being able to try different techniques to figure out what would help would be great too.

I will pass this thread along to my student to fill out a well. Again, thanks for doing this.

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Turning this around, as an event volunteer coming into your pit (e.g. RI, CSA, Judge), I’d appreciate some suggestions for things I can do to better support DHH students at events.

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Hi, thanks so much for asking! I can tell you what would be helpful for me, but everyone really does have super different experiences and needs. I also use spoken English, so this would be super different for a student who uses ASL.

I mentioned this earlier but I wear a little button that says “Hard of Hearing” on it. This is my way of indicating to a volunteer that comes into the pit that I’m going to have some trouble hearing them. I think it might be nice to have something like that available for those who want them.

The next thing is that when you’re having a conversation with a student it’s easiest to hear if you speak clearly, keep your mouth clear (not eating or covering your mouth), and face the student when you’re talking. I (and many DHH folks) am good at context clues/lip-reading/piecing things together when people speak clearly, but I will still not understand or get some things wrong, so if a student looks confused, says something that doesn’t make sense, or asks for clarification, just be willing to repeat. I also find it helpful to rephrase and use different words instead of repeating in the exact same way, since if I wasn’t able to understand the words the first time I likely still won’t get it the second time.

Really he main issue is just that the pits are incredibly loud and it’s difficult to hear. My best case solution would be to be able to talk to volunteers somewhere a little quieter, maybe outside or in another room. I don’t know how feasible that is, but it would be super helpful for me if there was a standard other location available for judging, inspections, etc.

The last thing isn’t exactly a thing that you could do as a volunteer coming into a pit, but the way competitions do pit announcements, emceeing, awards presentation, and alliance selection is usually over a bad intercom without an alternative available. I usually sit with a friend and badger them the whole time so they’ll tell me what’s going on, but it would be amazing to have maybe a live stream with captions or some other real time captioning availability.

I don’t know how much of that was what you’re looking for, but I hope at least some of it was helpful :slight_smile: !

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Aww, I’m glad you think it would have been helpful, and I’m so glad you guys were able to figure out how to accommodate your student! Thanks for sharing this with her, I would love to hear how you guys implement the remote mic, I have a lot of trouble using a mic in robotics-like setting because there are so many different people talking and so much background noise.

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Thanks.

I have been trying to make a habit of bringing paper to the pits — Inspection Checklists, rule books, answers to common CSA questions, judging criteria — so that people can better understand when they can’t hear me clearly. This is not only for DHH people, but also applies to teams where English is not a first language. I’ve also been trying to go paperless, with mixed success. (If you’re trying to go paperless, you’d better be ready to show a QR code.)

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The Finger Lakes Regional (held at RIT) actually has an LED board on one of the walls and Pit Admin gets to control it during the event. So most announcements (queueing, parts requests, etc) do get posted there!

Edit: I see your team is in California (assuming your profile is accurate), so probably not feasible, but definitely see if you can make it out this way! If nothing else, it’s an awesome event to volunteer at.

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I wish this was more common across events! This would’ve made the last three years of my time in FIRST so much easier!

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We only have it because the venue has it (and we requested control for it). It’s a wonderful (and occasionally terrible) tool haha

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Aside from pen/paper to help, I’m curious if there are any electronic solutions (ideally iOS for me but I’m open to suggestions) that would be helpful for a volunteer to come prepared with to help those in the d/Deaf community.

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Wow, that would be so nice. I don’t think I’ve ever heard a pit announcement well enough to understand it.

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That’s awesome! Having those visual aids is super valuable and helpful both to be able to access information that is missed or hard to hear, and if you’re working through something written it also just gives a little more context and information to help decode what you’re saying out loud.

The paper is nice and easy, but a QR code definitely seems like a good alternative!

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That’s awesome!! It would be super cool to go volunteer over there, but it is pretty far from CA, haha.

The display board is a really interesting solution for the announcement issue, I’ll contact the people running events over here and see if that’s something we could implement!