Hard of
Hearing and Deaf - One of a Series of Articles on the Awakening Oral
Hearing Loss Community
By Randy Collins
Editor: This post from Randy (to the HLWork list) was in response to
information that Swedish women with hearing loss were much more likely
to have trouble in the employment market than those with normal hearing.
As usual, Randy has some very insightful comments. One I particularly
like (and have adopted) is to always refer to the "hard of hearing
and Deaf" rather than "Deaf and hard of hearing". After
all, there are something like 100 hard of hearing folks for every Deaf
one. They should be mentioned first!
Here's Randy!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Wow! That is excellent information, although not surprising. First
there is the issue of gender equality and while things have improved I
don't imagine that anyone would say that gender discrimination no longer
exists. I'm not certain how that translates into hard of hearing but I
am certain it does. My experience has been that women seem more likely
to wear hearing aids than men, but I have no data to validate that.
Certainly in the work place hard of hearing people are unemployed,
underemployed or unaccommodated as a general rule. Add hearing loss to
being a woman in the workplace and you can bet opportunities are not
equal.
Regarding greater support for those fluent in sign language: Perhaps
it is because while few hearing people can conceptualize the condition
of being hard of hearing, they do believe (however erroneously) they
have an understanding of what it is like to be deaf. As a group we HOH
people are difficult to understand. LOL! It seems to be that most humans
need to see a physical manifestation of a disability in order to
empathize. Often by using ASL and interpreters Deaf people exhibit
visual signs (pun intended) of their disability. Deaf people are also
more pro-active about their communication needs. As a group they know
what works best for them. Generally HOH are NOT pro-active and as a
disability HOH people, in general, don't know what accommodations work
best for them. There's no way they are going to ask for accommodations.
Certainly the people on HLWork would know and would ask, as would SHHH
and ALDA members, but those groups are not representative of the rank
and file the HOH disability group.
Deaf people have been advocating for themselves for a long time. HOH
people are comparatively new to the game. Deaf people have a culture, a
language and tradition. HOH people are losing their ability to
participate equally in their culture (hearing, English, mainstream)
because they are losing their ability to fully use their native
language.
The end result of it all is that Deaf people have an entire
disability group advocating for fairly defined communication
accommodations. All Deaf people benefit from the group effort. We HOH
people aren't nearly as well organized. We can't get most members of our
disability to even admit they are HOH. Beyond that - as a group - we
don't speak with a unified voice, as our Deaf brothers and sisters do.
While we are much larger in number we have far fewer people advocating
for our needs. I think as a result we are likely to receive fewer
accommodations, perhaps especially in the workplace.
By the way, I've recently begun to reverse the "deaf and hard of
hearing" when I write it. Actually I'd prefer that in most cases
our issues would be addressed separately. We aren't "deaf
lite" or "less deaf"; our needs are often unique. We
aren't going to have our needs addressed separately for a while but at
least we can begin changing the perspective. I am working toward
creating a habit of always referring to "hard of hearing and
deaf". It's time we came first. We represent a much larger group.
While the Deaf community has made tremendous progress, and yes we have
benefited, HOH needs now must be addressed BEFORE people assume that
what works for Deaf works for hard of hearing.
