Deaf med student sues: They ignored my deafness.

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A Seattle man says his dreams of being a doctor are being dashed because Creighton University Medical School in Nebraska won’t accommodate his hearing impairment. At issue is just how far an institution must go to comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act.

The case, Argenvi v. Creighton University, is being heard in the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals in St. Paul, Minnesota.  Michael Argenyi, who has profound hearing loss, claims the school is in violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act because it has not provided him with interpreters and a real time captioning service known as CART. (See explanation below)

"What is Communication Access Realtime Translation? With CART, everything that is said is "captioned" live for deaf and hard of hearing clients. In fact, it can be thought of as captioning for non-broadcast settings, such as classrooms, churches, meetings, and conferences. The captioning may be on a small screen that can be read only by one deaf person, the way it was for me at the About.com conference. Or the CART captions can be displayed on an overhead (for a small group), broadcast on a large screen, on the internet, or broadcast via satellite.

The CART provider quickly types into a stenotype machine using machine shorthand, and the computer software translates that shorthand into realtime captions, matching the shorthand against what is in a specialized shorthand dictionary stored in the computer. The process is so fast that there is hardly any lag time between what is said and what the deaf person is able to read. This speed made it possible for me to be an active participant in the workshops at the conference."


The university says it has made accommodations,  providing Argenyi with note taking services and access to power point slide shows, among other things. But attorney Mary Vargas, who is representing Argenyi, says CART and interpreting services are what Argenyi really needs to excel.  “They offered him in one class to sit in front of the professor. And in clinics they said he would be better prepared to be a doctor if he didn’t use the accommodations and if he could hear,” Vargas said.
School officials say the fact that Argenyi passed his classes is proof that he's been adequately accommodated.  But Argenyi argues, and the Department of Justice has filed a "friend of the court" brief agreeing with this, that the school must providet "full and equal access" to all of the programs provided by the university.
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Are deaf entitled to more than one version of access format ?  In the UK we cannot even choose which terp we can have, and speech2text/captioning doesn't exist in my neck of the woods for anyone.