Hard of Hearing Need Not Apply

For years I and others have been lamenting the fact that the oral hearing loss community (my term for people with hearing loss who prefer oral communication, including hard of hearing, late-deafened, and oral deaf folks) has been pretty much ignored by virtually everyone else, and that the members of this group seemed content to accept the resulting lack of services, understanding, jobs, etc.

I think it's changing!!

I've seen several indications in the last few weeks that lead me to that conclusion, and I'll be sharing those over the next several weeks.

This first article is a wonderful statement of part of the problem. It's from a lively discussion that's taken place on the HLWork (Hearing Loss and the Workplace) list (http://groups.yahoo.com/groups/hlwork) over the past couple of weeks. One person posted an advertisement for a Relay Account Manager with Sprint. One of the REQUIREMENTS was "Proficiency in American Sign Language". I've never seen any statistics on relay USERS, but I'll bet the large majority of them do NOT sign. So why is "Proficiency in American Sign Language" a requirement for an account manager?

Here are Randy's thoughts on the subject.

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"5) Proficiency in American Sign Language"

That one sentence says - "no hard of hearing need apply". It's reverse discrimination. Look at it this way. If a relay organization mandated to serve hard of hearing and deaf required "Proficiency in Spoken English" there would be hell to pay, and rightfully so.

Deaf people would claim that the organization was discriminating because it refuses to hire and pay for interpreters and THAT would be their argument. In my opinion it would be a valid argument. So here we have Sprint, a relay organization mandated to serve hard of hearing and deaf people, requiring proficiency in American Sign Language. Why? Because it employs many deaf people. Sprint doesn't want to hire hard of hearing people and have to pay for interpreters! Same situation in reverse; discrimination in the opposite direction. Hard of hearing people are essentially locked out of the process.

Often as a rebuttal to this argument an employer will point to a token hard of hearing employee and proclaim the criticism unwarranted. More often than not that hard of hearing person will be fluent in sign and will be "culturally hard of hearing". A culturally hard of hearing person is someone who is audiologically hard of hearing but grew up in a deaf environment, went to deaf school, family is deaf, or grew up signing - often with ASL as their native language. In essence their linguistic experience is that of a culturally deaf person.

My wife, who has a 90 dB loss, went to mainstream school then Illinois School for the Deaf, Gallaudet, and then got her masters at NC State University, is a prime example of that. She grew up deaf but her hearing family worked on her speech from day one, later she insisted she learn sign because she was missing so much. Of course when she entered ISD in the 8th grade she signed all the time. With hearing aid technology today my wife functions like a hoh person.

The point is that the VAST majority of hard of hearing people do not have that experience. The VAST majority of hard of hearing people served by relay do not sign, and are linguistically and culturally separate from Deaf people. So what do relay companies do? They market to hard of hearing people from a Deaf perspective. How does that work? Not very well.

In general one thing HOH people do not want to be is deaf. Marketing from a deaf perspective or even a hearing perspective is simply wrong. Deaf people will be the first to tell you that they don't want to be treated like hearing people. I can't blame them; there's a linguistic and cultural difference. Again reverse that and tell me how it is to the advantage of hard of hearing people to have Deaf controlled services being provided from and by Deaf people?