Most people who’re severely to profoundly deaf (even with digital hearing-devices) will mention recurring exhaustion from “actively listening” all the time to communicate, to receive and remember daily facts, and to process at warp-speed detail that’s fed to you – in its incompleteness or entirety. A multi-choice survey on the “Hearing Ourselves Think” blog by
Public service broadcasters are tasked with serving the population in their country, often with a charter to define their obligations. On July 15th 2013, Ireland’s national broadcaster, RTÉ, held a free public lecture at University College Dublin, “Public Service Broadcasting: Innovating for the Needs of Tomorrow’s Audiences”, with “normalising difference” being one stated topic. Read:
Frameweld, the New York-based digital media firm, hosted an excellent webinar, “The Why and How of Online Captioning” on June 26th, 2013. All videos, slides and Q&A topics from the webinar are in this blog post: Review: The Why And How Of Online Captioning This topic is pertinent, with leading educational institutions tasked to find affordable
In June 2013, Sound Advice’s Caroline Carswell gave a workshop, “Mindset Change: Transforming Perceptions of Ability“, at the conference of the UK’s National Association of Disability Practitioners (NADP), in Cheshire, northern England. The Problem (Solution)! Read: Active Role Modeling Explained Parents, fearing for their child’s social, emotional and physical wellness, can overprotect a child and
Fred Suter, a deafened student from Germany who’s studying modern languages in the UK, shares how he uses realtime captions in lectures for 100% access to course material with a laptop, microphone and wifi network. Read: Experience of Communication Support At University For the Sound Advice team, this is exactly how students who’re deaf or hard-of-hearing
A family in the US state of Missouri is using the Google Translate online tool to communicate with their newly-adopted teen daughter – who’s deaf – by accessing instant translations between languages on iPods or smartphones. Read: Google Translate Links Family To Deaf, Adopted Daughter The speed of machine-translation tools means communicating parties can type in
Having to verbally “translate” for signing deaf friends who do not lip-read, confirmed this skill to Rachel Kolb, a masters student at Stanford University in California. She writes eloquently here, about the challenges of lip-reading. Read: Seeing At The Speed Of Sound In a TEDxStanford talk (June 2013), Rachel Kolb talked of being deaf in a hearing world,
Speech-to-text automation has a huge role in creating classroom captions for students with hearing and other issues, who don’t always note-take in class. To address the multi-speaker shortcomings of automated caption solutions, a program, Scribe, was devised at the University of Rochester. Scribe Tweaks Speech-To-Text Automation – With Humans Scribe works by crowd-sourcing humans to
An article, “Deafness Among Physicians and Trainees: A National Survey“, in the February 2013 issue of Academic Medicine, gives insights to how doctors with hearing issues access their training and get to work in the mainstream. Read: Are deaf/hoh physicians getting needed supports? Amplified stethoscopes (89%) were the most frequent accommodation, with hearing-devices/FM (32%), realtime captions
In 2009, a California-based high school student with a cochlear implant asked her school district to provide realtime captions in class, instead of a FM system, which she said gave her headaches and relayed static noise. At end-2012, the case was reopened with a similar, second case in the state. Read: Student asks Tustin schools