Accessibility in Houses of Worship

Top 3 reasons for having accessible services

Opportunity to show inclusivity and compassion toward everyone.

Around 48 million people in America experience some form of hearing loss, and yet there is always room for society to work harder to accommodate the Deaf community and those suffering with hearing loss. People attend services to feel a sense of belonging and worship alongside others who are like-minded. Expanding access fosters community, pride, and an eagerness to return.

Spread the Word to a larger number of people

Accessible services get your Message to more people. Even with the use of hearing aids, approximately 13% of adults still experience hearing difficulties. Congregants who are Deaf, hard of hearing, or who do not speak English as a first language may benefit from the written (and even translated) text on a screen or device. This allows for the Message to reach a wider audience and be better received.

Enhance the understanding of the service

Many types of people benefit from captions. As mentioned above, the Deaf community relies on closed captions and ASL interpreters to help them communicate. However, they aren’t the only ones who benefit from captioning. Children learning to read, people who struggle with maintaining attention, and a rapidly growing number of young people use captions to enhance their understanding and maintain focus.

Understanding how to reach a broader audience is the first step and NCI can help.  Baylor University has offered several guidelines and suggestions on how to create hearing accessibility. These include the addition of captions to extant audio/visual material (NCI can help with this!), employing visual aids such as posters or other artwork, encouraging the use of notepads and pens, and considering the use of ASL interpreters as well.

How to create an accessible service

NCI offers state-of-the-art speech-to-text technology to transform real-time audio into nearly-verbatim and highly accurate closed captions. Our automated captioning comes in 40+ languages and may be set up to suit your specific needs. With the ability to embed captions on a variety of platforms, we make accessibility easy and affordable.