The Year

Cheryl is one of the leading national advocates for people with hearing loss, and is involved in just about every hearing loss advocacy organization on the planet. Here she is with her take on the current hot issues.

This is part three of three parts.

For more coverage of this great convention, please point your browser to http://www.hearinglossweb.com/res/hlorg/alda/cn/2006/2006.htm

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Part One

Part Two

Emergency Preparedness

Moving to Emergency Preparedness, I want to go back to the July 2006 Access Board Meeting. Brenda Battat raised the concern of emergency information being announced over PA systems in public locations. Brenda keeps pushing that issue. Lisa Hanlin at the same meeting produced research that demonstrated that for waking people in case of fire, vibrating bed shakers are much more effective than strobe lights. 100% of people subjected to intermittent shaking woke up, compared to 33% for a strobe light and 90% for a low frequency audible alarm.

Lisa also pointed out that hotels are using stand-alone devices that are not connected to the building smoke alarm system. This severely reduces their effectiveness.

Public Accommodations

A recent decision by the Department of Justice requires TestMasters to provide auxiliary aids for their course to prepare people for the Law School Administration Test. This means that they must provide interpreters, note takers, etc. These schools often tell people that they don't have money for these things. But they are now required to provide them.

Air Travel Access

We've had a long history of trying to get access during travel. We started pushing for a NPE in 1996. It was finally published in 2006. The proposed rules have almost everything we asked for, but it's in limbo because of the departure of Transportation Secretary Mineta. He had been out champion, and now we'll have to see what happens. We may have to start all over with a new person to get this done.

Questions and Discussion

Q. I have joined NetFlix, and we have found that a third of he movies we order that are claimed to be captioned are not. Do you know what's up with that?
A. That's something we may have to advocate about. Maybe we can ask them to ensure that they provide accurate information about what is captioned and what isn't.

Q. You mentioned a test for Lawyers. There's a test for teachers called Praxis, and taking the test with accommodations is next to impossible. Reading what you had to go through to get an interpreter, I decided not to try. Do you know what we can do about that?
A. This is not something we have addressed. If it's a State requirement it has to be addressed at that level. If it's a national issue, we can try to address it.

Q. We get a lot of bad weather in Atlanta. The local news is 100% captioned from 5PM to 7pm. Then at 7 PM, if there is an emergency, the captions disappear.
A. If it's an emergency situation, they are required to provide the information in a form accessible to people with hearing loss. I met with the FCC and I pointed out a Catch-22 that they have never addressed. They require us to tell them what is missing. How can we do that? We have no idea what is missing!

Q. I want to clarify something. I live in a small town. We have four stations. Two of them caption their news and two do not. Does that meet the requirements?
A. All stations are required to caption the news. In the top 25 markets it has to be real-time. Outside of the top 25, they can use the Electronic Newsroom Technique.

Q. The morning news has gone to a magazine format. Does the 100% rule mean that everything has to be captioned, like things outside the studio?
A. My sense is that they have to caption that, but I'm not sure.

Q. In my community, the television station has a contract with a CART reporter to provide emergency captioning whenever it's required. I'm wondering if the National Cart Reporters Association has any program to encourage that kind of service.
A. I don't know if the national association can do that, because of Fair Trade restrictions.

Part One

Part Two