National Technical Institute for the Deaf Will Receive $100,000 Grant from National Endowment for the Arts

Rochester Institute of Technology’s National Technical Institute for the Deaf has been awarded $99,755 from Research Grants in the Arts by the National Endowment for the Arts to support a mixed-methods research study on the availability and effectiveness of access accommodations for deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals experiencing live theater. 

“Based on our own lived experiences and scholarship, we are aware that deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals face significant barriers to accessing live theater in spoken English,” said Jill Bradbury, professor and principal investigator for the grant. “Funding from the Research Grants in the Arts program will enable us to transform this knowledge into research that will bring awareness and improvement to deaf and hard-of-hearing audiences' experiences of live theater.”

The research will focus on the prevalence of accessible live theater in spoken English for deaf and hard-of-hearing audiences in the United States; barriers live theater companies face in providing or increasing accessible performances for deaf and hard-of-hearing audience; the  frequency in which deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals attend live theater in spoken English and what accessibility methods do they use; the satisfaction of deaf and hard-of-hearing live theater patrons with captioning as an accessibility method for experiencing live theater; and best practices for providing access to live theater in spoken English for deaf and hard-of-hearing audiences. 

“Our goal is to provide guidelines to assist theater companies in making decisions about captioning technology and approaches that best support deaf and hard-of-hearing people’s access to live theater in spoken English,” added Bradbury.

 NEA will award 18 Research Grants in the Arts for a total of $1,024,755 in funding to support a broad range of research studies that investigate the value and/or impact of the arts, either as individual components of the U.S. arts ecosystem or as they interact with each other and/or with other domains of American life.

Photo  Credit: Bailee Strang