Online course and MOOC access issues are being flagged by individuals bringing lawsuits against content providers, the latest being Ian Deandrea-Lazarus in New York state – who requested closed captions on course content instead of sign language interpretation. Read: Student at University of Rochester suing the American Heart Association In February 2015, the New York Times reported that
Voice contact with call centres, or making appointments and reservations, or simple voice-based chats with friends and coworkers are opening to profoundly deaf people, with apps. An app created in Italy, Pedius, joins Transcence, RogerVoice, VoxSense and Speak2See in making spoken dialogue visible on smartphones in group and one-to-one contexts. Read: Pedius app converts speech to text in real time At Ireland’s Web Summit in November 2014,
Eighty-three per cent of 696 deaf preschoolers in Australia and New Zealand actively speak words at or above hearing-peer level, according to First Voice, whose group of centres teach deaf children to hear and talk with digital hearing devices. Read: Australia leads the world in teaching deaf children to listen and speak More details from the research are
Childrens’ speech perception drops visibly in open plan classrooms, disturbing their efforts to hear discussions with peers and teachers, and leading to chronic listening fatigue. Read: Students struggle to hear teachers in new fad open-plan classrooms Teachers in open-plan classrooms reported greater vocal strain amid concerns that the children could not hear their voices, leading researchers to conclude that acoustically treated, enclosed classrooms make
A certain irony existed in being asked by Dr Peter Sloane, to join a panel at the Vasco da Gama Movement Forum in Dublin – after doctors in the 1970s had said I would never talk. Before this call to speak on the science of cochlear implants, the VdGM (Vasco da Gama Movement), the WONCA Europe Working Group for New
Deafness is not a learning disability, as the NDCS routinely reminds us. However, the UK’s education system is not ‘failing’ children who are deaf, as this headline suggests. Rather, the infants’ education begins at home with their families, once their hearing difficulties are confirmed with a diagnosis and hearing-devices ideally accessed at the earliest opportunity. Children Born After 2006 Accessed UNHS
Soundfields have universal benefit as a solution introduced for children and students who have hearing difficulties, with positive outcomes noted for everyone in the learning space. Progressive schools in the United States are building soundfields into new classrooms for this reason – notably as solutions facilitate collaborative teaching and learning activities. That’s the beauty of classroom technology: it can be differentiated at
For the last blog post of 2014, here are some recent media pieces, to remind ourselves how early access to hearing and speech services can improve childrens’ life prospects. Lydia Denworth (author of I Can Hear You Whisper) Lydia Denworth’s recent post in Time Magazine, Raising A Deaf Child Makes The World Sound Different, will resonate with parents of
The Phonic Ear hearing-aid, that big beige box worn in the 1970s by kids who were deaf. Book illustrator Cece Bell rewrote her life story this year, with a Phonic Ear giving her super-powers in a graphic novel. Bell’s self-deprecating humour about wearing the hearing-aid and the everyday social interactions it generated will be welcomed by fellow wearers. Interview: Cece
Students at Loyola University, Maryland are captioning live sports events to gain critical work experience and enable the university to deliver on its campus-wide accessibility goals. Read: Loyola students to provide live captioning for athletics events Ironically, the routine glitches in YouTube’s auto-captions service led the university to hire a student volunteer team to caption its official videos. From there, the
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