The Older Hearing‐impaired Adult in the Classroom: Real‐time Closed Captioning as a Technological Alternative to the Oral Lecture

The “graying of America,” combined with incentives by institutions of higher education to attract more older students, has resulted in an increase of older adults on college campuses. Presbycusis (hearing loss associated with aging) is a fact of life for many of these older students. Therefore, it can be assumed that at least some of these older students will have varying degrees of hearing impairment. The presence of a hearing loss can put the student at a definite disadvantage when important information in the course is presented in a lecture format. This discussion suggests an alternative available to the older student to help compensate for his or her impaired hearing. The use of real‐time closed caption‐ing, a computer‐based system designed to allow the “spoken word” to be transformed into the “written word” almost instantaneously, will be discussed in terms of its application to an educational setting.