Accessibility For the Hearing Impaired
Originally Posted April 30, 2008
Being visually impaired, it is difficult for me to clearly understand learning needs by the hearing impaired community. At first, one would think that all hearing impaired are visual learners. One would also think that closed captioning is the only requirement for making a multimedia web site accessible to the hearing impaired.
Today, I spent some time discussing web based learning needs of the hearing impaired with a teacher from the North Carolina School for the Deaf. I learned some very interesting myths about hearing impaired learning needs.
- Closed captioning on a multimedia web site is all that is needed by the hearing impaired. – This is not true. For individuals who have partial hearing loss, closed captioning is very helpful. For individuals who have been totally deaf since birth, English is a second language. For many deaf people, reading English text requires experience in translating to their native language. Sign language is their native language. For web pages with audio and/or video, sign language would be very helpful and would be preferred by some deaf persons.
- All hearing impaired people are visual learners. – This is not true. This is a gross stereotype. Some hearing impaired persons are tactile learners. Some would have naturally been auditory learners. One size does not fit all hearing impaired learners.
- Any certified sign language interpretor can be used to sign a course lesson. – This is not necessarily optimal. A certified sign language interpretor can sign a lesson, but skills of an instructor or teacher would be an added value. Teachers are subject matter experts in what they teach. They are also aware of the language skills of their students. Signing for calculus, or a high level math course, may require different signing skills than that done by a generalist. Signing to grade school students would be different than for high school students. The quality of the signing can make a difference in the learning experience of a hearing impaired student.
Infinity Learning Solutions (ILS) is working with the City University of New York, Hunter College and IBM Research to add automated closed captioning in the DigitalChalk Fall Release. Though this is helpful, we at ILS are committed to adding a capability for audio/video sign language translation as well. Signing would have to be added manually to the audio/video. I hope this will help.