For the first time in almost five years at the University of Queensland, student Marissa Ker knows exactly what's going on in her lectures.
It's not that she hasn't been paying attention or has mistakenly enrolled in the wrong subjects. On the contrary, she graduated bachelor of arts (with a double major in Japanese) last November and is currently well on the road towards a law degree.
But until now it hasn't been easy for the 21-year-old who was left profoundly deaf after tumbling from an armchair and banging her head in a childhood accident 10 years ago.
This year, however, through the Student Support Services disability program, Marissa has been able to tap into the latest in communications technology being offered by a new Brisbane business called Reporters Ink.
During every lecture for her four law subjects this semester she will sit next to a stenographer who, using a phonetic shorthand keyboard, types out a verbatim copy of what the lecturer is saying.
The keyboard is connected to a computer which unscrambles the phonetic signals and within seconds turns them back into words on a laptop screen in front of Marissa.
Business partners and stenographers Sellina Baker and Sandy Clark can process up to 250 words a minute - more than enough to keep pace with the fastest speaker - so Marissa can read what is being said almost as soon as the words are spoken.
In fact Marissa does not have to rely solely on the screen as she has acute lip-reading skills and also wears hearing aids. In addition she is wired to a special FM microphone worn by the lecturers which cuts out background noise and improves sound quality.
However, the new system represents a massive leap forward. "It's a major breakthrough and has hugely improved access for me. The service is now much better than ever before," Marissa said.
"For the first time in my whole degree I can understand what's being said as it's being said. I even get the benefit of little asides and jokes which I would have completely missed before.
"I still look at the lecturer in order to lip-read most of the time but if I miss something I only have to glance at the screen and there it is."
Not only that, but at the end of the day, after a little on-screen editing, the machine can produce a perfect set of lecture notes.
Disability adviser Laura Duggan said the University offered a range of services and equipment to assist students who had mobility, hearing, vision or other disabilities. The one Marissa made most use of over the last four years was peer notetaking.
"From my first year I have always sat next to someone with neat writing who has taken lecture notes for both of us which I would photocopy and sometimes copy out afterwards," Marissa said.
"I would take notes too but sometimes I had to look at a third set to piece everything together and perhaps talk to the lecturer as well. It could become quite an involved process with a fair bit of extra work for me.
"Then last year I had the benefit of a typist and this year the ?real time' transcription service which is just great."
Marissa studied Japanese for five years at school in her home town of Bundaberg where she also had support from specially employed notetakers and lots of encouragement from "very helpful teachers".
She enjoyed Japanese and believes she has a natural gift for languages ? and for lip-reading which she taught herself.
Now she reads and writes Japanese with confidence and can lip-read all but the most difficult Japanese words and phrases. She has visited Japan three times and hopes to live there for a year to become totally fluent in the language.
Marissa spends one day a week doing research work at a Brisbane law firm and thinks she may go on to qualify as a solicitor after she finishes her law degree next year. "Ideally I'd like a career in which I could use my law and Japanese skills," she said.
For further information, contact Marissa Ker (email: s327582@student.uq.edu.au) or Laura Duggan (telephone 3365 1508).
