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Students who are Deaf or Hard of Hearing require Communication Access in Realtime translation (CART), which is basically human generated live captions, as an accommodation to be able to have equal access to the lectures. Due to the pandemic, many in-person providers are no longer available, and almost all of these services are now conducted remotely. To do this the student provides a microphone to a professor, which then audio to their laptop and into a video conferencing tool like Zoom. The remote captionist then listens via the students zoom room, and provides those captions through a third party tool called StreamText (a website that displays the running transcript).

Given the ever evolving types of devices (i.e tablets, laptops, OS systems) and the shrinking number of ports on devices, your task is to design a stand alone device that a student can bring to class, connect to a standard microphone (preferably the RODEs System to allow for multiple microphones), and stream that audio to a captioner. The client does not have be Zoom, however we use this because the personal room links in Zoom don't change. The captionist knows the student and has that information, but could also have their whatsapp contact or another consistent link. The device must be able to be configured easily for each student and captioner and be able to connect to the University network. If any error were to occur with the device the users must be able to easily identify and troubleshoot it.