CART systems have been around for many years and have long been recognized by the federal government as a “reasonable accommodation” under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). So it’s disappointing and a little surprising that CART service isn’t yet a standard accommodation for hard-of-hearing people called to jury duty.
Now that it’s been several years since the FCC mandated closed captions on regular TV broadcasts, including live news, and now that nearly all DVD’s from Hollywood come with optional subtitles, I’ve learned how much I’ve been missing when I have to fall back on speech reading and portable amplifiers to supplement my hearing aids. There are many business meetings where I need to struggle along understanding half to three-quarters of what is said. Lucky for me, I have empathetic clients who don’t mind repeating themselves, and my partners take good notes and are patient about filling me in after-the-fact on things I’ve missed. Even then, after a day of struggling to hear, worrying about what I didn’t hear, and working overtime to catch up on what I missed, I am completely exhausted. And I haven’t had to worry about whether I’ve understood the guilt or innocence of someone charged with a crime. So trying to struggle through a day in court without video captioning is a non-starter for me.
The good news is that the court officer was so understanding and so quick to release me. I was ready for a long day of trying to explain why their amplifiers wouldn’t work for me. The courthouse I was called to in Woburn, Massachusetts is brand new and wired to the hilt with all kinds of amplification, plus they provide personal listening amplifiers for people who need them. Unfortunately I’ve had long experience trying to make those devices work, and while they provide an incremental improvement, they don’t provide the kind of comprehensive understanding that CART video transcription provides.
Most likely, I didn’t have to explain myself because they’ve been down this road often enough to understand that, given the fact CART is now a reasonable ADA accommodation, it’s unreasonable not to provide the service. I appreciate how understanding they were and how quick they were to let me go, but at the end of the day my preference would have been to have access to the communication service I need so that I could step up and perform my civic duty.