Hearing Impairment…Living in a Sound-filled World

First of two parts
You may have read this past week the tragic story of a jogger killed by a single-engine plane that made an emergency landing on the beach at Hilton Head Island. This father of two young children was listening to his iPod and never heard the disabled aircraft which, without a propeller and an engine, silently glided onto the beach about three miles from its intended destination of Hilton Head Airport. The victim’s mother, obviously in shock, was quoted as saying, “If they had told me he had a car accident, I think I could’ve handled it. But they told me about this airplane . . . that is such a fluky thing. I was just out of my mind.”
For the parent of a hearing person, the threat of serious harm from an inability to hear oncoming danger is probably rather low on the list of their concerns for their child. But for the family of a person who is deaf or hard of hearing, it is a concern that is always front and center. Ironically, the jogger at Hilton Head limited his ability to hear what was going on in his environment by use of modern technology in the form of an iPod. Technology, on the other hand, has in many ways improved the lives of the hearing impaired, bringing them more into the mainstream by increasing their means of communication.
One of the areas in which advances in technology have perhaps most impacted the everyday life of those with hearing impairment is telecommunication. A pioneer in this field, James C. Marsters, died in August 2009 at the age of 85. Marsters, a deaf orthodontist, collaborating with Robert H. Weitbrecht, a deaf physicist, designed the text telephone or TTY, which for the first time provided deaf people independent access to telephone service. The TTY, linking Teletype machinery over telephone lines through an acoustic modem, was just the beginning of a succession of technologies that help the estimated 23 million Americans with hearing loss to communicate.
Today, for example, a free Web-based service, the Sprint WebCap Tel®, allows people who speak but can’t hear over the phone to read word-for-word captions of their calls on a web browser. (Information is available at www.sprintrelay.com). And in this age of cell phone use, researchers have created prototypes that permit deaf individuals to communicate in sign language in real time. Like the TTY in the 1960s, this technology has been slow to get to a mass market. But researchers are confident that the Mobile ASL project will soon produce a cell phone that is user friendly and affordable.
Title III of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) requires businesses and agencies to remove many barriers to communication for deaf and hard of hearing individuals by providing auxiliary aids and services for them. These include, but are not limited to: computer-aided transcription services, telephone handset amplifiers, assistive listening devices and systems, telephones compatible with hearing aids, closed caption decoders, open and closed captioning, telecommunication devices for deaf persons (TTYs) and videotext displays. Even this partial list of aids and services included in the ADA legislation [28 C.F.R. 36.303(b)(1)] indicates how far technology has come in enabling individuals with hearing impairment to feel comfortable in our sound-filled world.
Next Time … Part Two: Navigating the World of Hearing Aids
DID YOU KNOW?
• The NJ Department of Human Services, Division of the Deaf and Hard of Hearing (DDHH) operates an assistive device demonstration center on the campus of the Katzenbach School for the Deaf in Ewing. The Brian Shomo Center allows individuals to try out different devices such as TTYs, amplified phones, videophones, video relay, Internet relay, baby alert systems, extra-audible with strobe smoke detectors and door knocker systems. Call DDHH for more information or to schedule an appointment at 1-800-792-8339 (V/TTY) or 609-943-4271 (videophone)
• The Center for Hearing and Communication (formerly the League for the Hard of Hearing) provides an online resource called “Ask the Experts” that gives consumers direct access to hearing health professionals. This service is available at the Center’s website: www.chchearing.org
• The FCC requires all voice service providers nationwide to provide toll-free 7-1-1 dialing for access to all Telecommunications Relay Services (TRS). TRS, a confidential system available 24/7, facilitates telephone conversations between people with hearing or speech disabilities and people with or without such disabilities. For more information about the various types of TRS, visit the Disability Rights Office website: www.fcc.gov/cgb/dro
• New Jersey is a leader in ensuring that movie theatres are accessible to those who are deaf or hard of hearing, with 60 screens at movie theatres that provide open captioning (OC) and rear window captioning (RWC). AMC, Loew’s, Clearview Cinemas, and National Amusements all offer RWC, while Regal Cinemas offers OC
• A new movie listing search engine called Captionfish (www.captionfish.com) pulls all available RWC and OC movies in n your area into 1 easy-to-read site.
• A number of major TV broadcasting companies provide captioning with video streaming on the Internet. Some of the websites that currently offer captioning on several programs and video are: www.nbc.com; www.abc.com; www.cbs.com; www.fox.com; www.cnn.com; www.aol.com; www.hulu.com; www.youtube.com; and www.google.com
Pierson is the Coordinator of the Cape May County Office of Disability Services