Title: Hearing accessibility at conferences and in magnetic resonance neuroimaging

Brisbane Convention & Exhibition Centre 

Accessibility is a critical dimension of diversity and inclusivity. In this roundtable, we will focus on current best practices and the latest technology to improve hearing accessibility in 2 scenarios: firstly, at the OHBM Annual Meeting, and secondly, in the MRI environment. While hearing accessibility procedures are often developed to enable people with sensory impairments (e.g., people who are D/deaf, or those with hearing loss) to receive information, hearing accessibility principles actually improve comprehension of spoken language for the vast majority of people. For example, people for whom English is an additional language, and people with auditory processing difficulties (common in older age, neurodegenerative illness, and in conditions like ADHD, autism, and learning disorder), benefit from these principles. Further, it is known from bilingual and educational psychology that comprehension and retention is improved when content is delivered both orally and with captions (e.g., Zheng et al., 2022; Adesope & Nesbit, 2012).

In this roundtable, we will demonstrate that

1) Multilingual transcription is possible at international conferences
2) Supplementing auditory instructions in the MRI environment with captions improves the experience for all participants/patients, and expands diversity of participant pools by enabling individuals with mild hearing loss to participate in MRI studies
3) Providing captioned instructions in the MRI environment opens novel opportunities for functional neuroimaging in understudied populations, including people who are D/deaf or with hearing loss, cerebral palsy, Parkinson’s or Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), among others