In the lead-up to the DC/Maryland NAQT high school championship, we studied three possibilities for accomodating deaf & hearing-impaired teams, working with QB coaches from Model Secondary School for the Deaf and Gallaudet. Those options were: - Use of an interpreter - Use of acetates and an overhead projector - Creation of some kind of computerized display system Our goal was to provide both teams with equal access to the same information; this is the standard these ideas were tested against. The use of an intepreter was found to have two major disadvantages: the first was the difference in grammar between English and ASL; the second was the prohibitive expense of hiring or difficulty of finding a volunteer interpreter with technical fluency in the diverse fields QB makes use of. QB makes use a very large technical vocabulary. - Printing questions onto acetates and using an overhead projector, with tossups revealed line-by-line as they're read, is the only method with a precedent, after having been used at Virginia's NAQT HS event last year. Printing acetates is expensive, although less so than hiring an interpreter, and this method was the one that was going to be used until MSSD dropped out and rendered all the preparations unnecessary. Two disadvantages to this method are that the team reading primarily off the projector has a lag disadvantage, and that both teams can see power marks; the latter was judged to be acceptable since both teams had equal access to the same information. - Development of some computer system for reading questions was the most problematic in the short term, but probably presents the best solutions in the long term. In its final form, the proposal was that a Powerpoint or Powerpoint-like program would scroll-reveal one word of a tossup at a time, and that the moderator would read at the rate that words were revealed; at the same time, the output would be projected onto an overhead screen. Teams would continue to see power marks, but would near-simulatneous access to every word of the question; furthermore, speed of text display should be easily adjustable by the moderator. On the other hand, converting and formatting the questions would have been a slow process, unless there were some program that could automatically interpret the question sets, or read flags in them, to create individual slides for each tossup and an easy interface to call sequential boni as needed. Edmund
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