Volume 22 Issue 8

- Article 1: Hard of Hearing Need Not Apply
- Article 2: Factors Affecting Speech Recognition in CIs - Part 3
- Article 3: Super Bowl Advertisers Ignore Deaf and Hard of Hearing Persons
- Article 4: State Wants to Clarify 'Disabled'
- Classifieds: One Pager Vendor, one Card Vendor, one Call for Papers, one Conference, and one Employment Opportunity
- Contact Information and Disclaimers

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Contact information and disclaimers are at the end of this newsletter.
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- Article 1: Hard of Hearing Need Not Apply
By Randy Collins
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Editor: Hooray!! I think it's finally happening!!

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?

Relay companies simply don't care about the hard of hearing perspective. The only people who are going to change that are hard of hearing people.

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------------- Do you or someone you know work with ------------
-------------- deaf or hard of hearing students? --------------
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If so, come participate in our survey: The National Survey of Assessment and Accommodations for Deaf and Hard of Hearing Students. The purpose of this project is to provide a national "snapshot" of assessment practices. We also hope to encourage dialog among professionals who work with deaf and hard of hearing students.

Professionals who are familiar with assessment practices for deaf and hard of hearing students are encouraged to participate, including teachers, school psychologists, and school or district administrators. To participate or to sign up for study results, see our project website: www.dhh-assess-survey.org or email Dr. Stephanie W. Cawthon, Principal Investigator, at scawthon@waldenu.edu.
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- Article 2: Factors Affecting Speech Recognition in CIs - Part 3
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Editor: We recently had the pleasure of having Robert V. Shannon, Ph.D. discuss at our local CIAI meeting the various factors affecting speech recognition among CI users. Dr. Shannon is the Director of the Auditory Implants Research Lab at the House Ear Institute, so is eminently qualified to speak on this topic!

This is part three of three parts!

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ABI Breakthrough?

The final portion of this presentation was on a recent "breakthrough" in ABIs (acoustic brainstem implants). These are devices similar to CIs, but which are implanted into the brainstem, rather than the cochlea. They are used in patients whose auditory nerve is not intact, so that nothing that happens in the cochlea can be transmitted to the brain.

The conventional wisdom is that they can provide environmental clues and help in lip reading, but that enabling speech recognition is beyond their capability. It turns out that may not be the case!

ABIs are typically used for people with neurofibromatosis, type 2 (NF2). This disease causes tumors to grow on various nerve tissues, including the auditory nerve. Removing the tumor typically severs the auditory nerve; the patient becomes totally deaf and is unable to benefit from a CI. In such cases, an ABI is the treatment of choice.

A speech recognition study on NF2 patients with ABIs yields results significantly different from those of CI patients. 95% of these ABI recipients achieve less than 20% on standard sentence recognition tests, and the remaining 5% are under 40% recognition. (This compares to an average score of 90% among CI users.) It has long been thought that these results were due to inherent limitations in the ABI or in implant location (brainstem rather than the cochlea). It now appears that this is not the case!

A recent study of ABI recipients whose auditory nerve was severed for reasons other than NF2 has produced far better speech recognition scores. The average sentence recognition score is about 50%, and almost a quarter of patients scored over 80%!

Dr. Shannon was careful to note that any conclusions beyond this point are very speculative, but he believes that the reduced performance of NF2 patients may result from some unrecognized effect the disease has on the brainstem.

It may be that brainstem characteristics are limiting CI performance, as well, and that future research in this area can significantly improve the performance of CIs as well as ABIs!

Q. What are your thoughts on bilateral implants?

A. It's pretty clear that some people derive significant benefit from bilateral implants, but it seems that others don't. Many of the people who perform better after getting the second implant did not perform well with their first implant. So that may be a case of a problem with the first implant.

Another perceived advantage of bilateral implants is that it eliminates the head shadow effect. (A person's head between their "good" ear and the speaker reduces their ability to understand speech.) This is a real advantage, but one that could be achieved more easily by putting a second microphone on the other side.

The real advantage of bilateral implants is achieved by those who are able to localize sound as a result of bilateral processing, because that's associated with better understanding in the presence of noise. But only about a third of bilateral recipients achieve that benefit.

So, I think there's promise there. But I'm not yet willing to make a blanket endorsement.

Q. What is your opinion of the hybrid devices that use a standard hearing aid for low frequency sound and a CI for high frequency sound in the same ear?

A. There are several of these studies going on, and they seem to be quite successful. For those patients who have relatively good low frequency hearing, we insert a shortened electrode array part way into the cochlea. Those electrodes stimulate the high frequency receptors, and the low frequency receptors are stimulated by standard acoustic (amplified) means.

In most cases it works quite well. In some cases, the partial insertion of the electrode array destroys the low frequency residual hearing as well, so that's a risk.

Q. I was very surprised when I heard how bad music sounds. My daughter was implanted at about 14 months. She's 17 months now, and she dances when she hears music. She clearly knows the difference between speech and music.

A. Remember that what you heard is not necessarily what a person with a CI hears. It seems that music sounds better to them than our CI simulated music does to hearing people.

My other comment is that pretty much everything we've said today refers to adults who had relatively normal hearing for much of their lives and then lost it. The situation is very different for people who have never had normal hearing.

Kids are incredibly adaptable and many do much better than the "standard" results for deafened adults, both with speech and music. Those who are implanted at younger ages tend to do better. Some early implantees have learned to play an instrument and even to sing fairly well. As far as I know, that's beyond the capability of virtually anyone implanted as an adult.

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- Article 3: Super Bowl Advertisers Ignore Deaf and Hard of Hearing Persons
By Cheryl Heppner
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Editor: Some things clearly make perfect sense the minute you see them; some are uncertain; some clearly make NO sense. The captioning of television advertising clearly falls in the third category. Television ads are amazingly expensive to produce, and the cost to purchase time on the major networks is astronomical, especially during events like the Super Bowl. Not captioning any television ad is economic insanity, and that goes triple for Super Bowl ads.

The cost to produce a 30-second television ad is tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. The cost of broadcasting that ad during the Super Bowl was $2.4 million. So for something like $2.5 million dollars, an advertiser's message was available to about 117 million people (Of the estimated 130 million who watched it, an estimated 90% or 117 million were able to hear and understand the spoken message.) That's a cost per consumer of about two cents.

The cost to caption that 30-second commercial is about $250, and the captioning makes the commercial accessible to the 13 million people who are unable to understand the spoken message. So how many of these consumers does the advertiser reach for the two cents he spent on a single hearing consumer? You better sit down! The answer is over 1000! By that measure, the return on the money an advertiser spends on captioning is over 1000 times the return on the money he spends on producing and broadcasting the commercial! Yet, less than half of the Super Bowl commercials were captioned!

OK, enough from me. I'm getting off the soapbox, and Cheryl Heppner of NVRC is getting on. Here are her thoughts from the February 12 edition of NVRC News.

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For me, part of the whole spectacle of watching the Super Bowl each year is seeing what cool, crazy and creative new commercials will appear. In my opinion, if they are going to interrupt the main event so often, they should be spectacular.

It's hard to judge the quality of the ads I saw during the 2005 Super Bowl. I was stunned by how many did not have captions; it seemed like far less than last year. I felt like I was at a party where I largely saw the jokes and didn't get the punch line.

captions.com confirmed my impression on Monday. Each year they monitor the commercials during the Super Bowl to tally which have captions and which do not. Their website claims that a 30-second commercial costs $2.4 million, and the cost to caption an ad of that length was just $250.

I took a look at their list, and sure enough there were more ads without captions than with them. Ford and Pepsi both had four commercials and didn't caption any of them. Doesn't it make you wonder if their marketing people are really ignorant, or whether they don't think we have any buying power? Or perhaps their advertising agencies aren't very savvy?

You can find the list of who's been bad and who's been good at: http://www.captions.com/superbowl_content_frame.html

captions.com has provided links for many of the advertisers on the list so you can praise them or chide them.

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- Article 4: State Wants to Clarify 'Disabled'
By Susan M. Cover, Staff Writer
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Editor: Do you remember a few years ago when there were several attempts to weaken the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA)? One of the attempts was to declare that anyone whose disability was correctable would not be considered disabled. As you would expect, there were lots of debates about the definition of the word "correctable".

The practice in Maine has long been that a person with a correctable disability is still considered disabled. The Maine Human Rights Commission is attempting to codify that practice to ensure that the policy continues. And, of course, some folks are fighting it.

Here's the story from The February 12 edition of the Kennebec Journal. It is reprinted with their kind permission.

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AUGUSTA -- A proposed amendment to the rules that govern the Maine Human Rights Commission would clarify who is considered disabled.

On Monday, the commission will take public testimony on an amendment that would define someone as disabled if they "cannot function normally without medication, auxiliary aids or prosthetic devices."

The amendment would put in writing what has been the practice of the commission for 30 years, said Patricia Ryan, executive director of the Human Rights Commission.

But the change has businesses worried about the potential for increased cost and the possibility of facing discrimination lawsuits.

As an example, if a person wears a hearing aid and can perform normal work functions, the employer also has to consider how that same person would perform while not wearing a hearing aid, said John Gause, an attorney for the Maine Disability Rights Center.

"The change is so, under state law, you look at a person with the hearing aid out," he said.

That person would be considered disabled and entitled to accommodations at work that would help the person perform his or her job better.

Sticking with the hearing aid example, a company might have to provide an assistive listening device on a telephone for the employee, Gause said. It also means that a person can sue their employer if they feel proper accommodations haven't been made because of their disability.

That concerns the Maine State Chamber of Commerce and Philip Moss, a lawyer with Moon, Moss, McGill & Shapiro in Portland.

Moss said the proposed amendment is more strict than federal case law and could force companies to make accommodations for people who wear glasses or take allergy medicine.

Once someone is classified as disabled, there's a strict protocol that must be followed, which means companies would have to determine on a case-by-case basis who is entitled to extra help at work because of a disability.

He said the change would be burdensome to businesses, increase the caseload of the Maine Human Rights Commission and subject companies to what he called "dual regulation." That means they would have to follow state and federal law, and if they have companies in more than one state, that could mean a number of different standards.

"Who's going to pay for it?" Moss said.

Gause said he doesn't believe it will result in more litigation because the proposal simply puts in writing what has been the practice all along. He noted that Rhode Island and Massachusetts, along with other states, have similar definitions.

Written testimony on the proposal will be accepted until Feb. 24. Ryan said a final decision on the amendment likely won't be made until the April 11 meeting of the commission.

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- Classifieds
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One Pager Vendor, one Card Vendor, one Call for Papers, one Conference, and one Employment Opportunity appear in this issue. (Ads appear after this brief table of contents.)

Pagers and Accessories
Deafpager.com

Sign Language Greetings!
Cards and Postcards for All Occasions
Signlanguagegreetings.com

Call For Papers for ALDAcon
ALDA International Convention
Salt Lake City, UT
September 7 - 11, 2005

Jewish Deaf Singles Conference
West Orange, NJ
March 18 - 20, 2005

Employment Opportunity
Secondary Science Teacher
Idaho School for the Deaf and the Blind (ISDB)
Gooding, Idaho

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Pagers and Accessories
Deafpager.com
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Deafpager.com has a new Hot Accessories section with the latest and hottest accessories for your Sidekick and Blackberry!

The newest item in our inventory is color bumpers for your Sidekick II - easy to put on, easy to take off! The hard part is trying to decide between Pink or Purple? Maybe it would be easier to decide between Red or Blue? Made up your mind which color you like? Only $8.95 per set!

Still can't make up your mind? Don't worry, we sell sets of three for only $20.95! We also have auto chargers for the Sidekick II for only $7.95! Visit our site for our excellent selection of cases and pouches. We offer qualified customers a Free Sidekick II (after rebates) as well as color Blackberries for qualified customers for $49.99 after rebates. We now have an unlimited data-only plan for the new Motorola A630!

Check all these deals out and more at our website: www.deafpager.com! Email: info@deafpager.com.

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Sign Language Greetings!
Cards and Postcards for All Occasions
Signlanguagegreetings.com
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Welcome to Sign Language Greetings!

Here you can find Greeting cards and postcards with an interpreted message in Sign Language inside or on the back of the card!

Check out our website...
Signlanguagegreetings.com

Stay tuned as we will have more fun cards on the way...!

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Call For Papers for ALDAcon
ALDA International Convention
Salt Lake City, UT
September 7 - 11, 2005
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The Association of Late Deafened Adults (ALDA Inc. http://www.alda.org/) is now accepting proposals for workshop presentations at its 17th annual international convention to be held at the Little America Hotel in Salt Lake City September 7th-11th. ALDAcon is a convention held by, and for people who are late deafened, HOH, or have family or friends dealing with any degree of hearing loss. In addition ALDAcon has features speakers who are well known to the D/deaf community, such as I. King Jordan, Dr Robert Davila and Cheryl Heppner.

To request a Call for Papers or more information on our program you may contact
Carolyn Piper
Program Chair
wicwas@wcvt.com

For general information on the ALDAcon 2005 please contact planning chairs
Kathy Evans <patches_alda@yahoo.com>
Linda Lewis <utmtns05@yahoo.com>

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Jewish Deaf Singles Conference
West Orange, NJ
March 18 - 20, 2005
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Call for all Jewish Deaf and Hard of hearing Singles, divorces, & widows

Join to our a great program - Jewish Deaf Single Registry

Where: West Orange, New Jersey
When: March 18-20, 2005

We will have:
- FUN outings
- INFORMATIVE workshops
- STIMULATING activities, and
- MORE for the Jewish deaf and hard of hearing singles including widowed and divorced worldwide, in any level of Judaism and way of communication.

Meals are provided.

Offer private residence (free) or hotel.

Limited scholarships are available.

There will be no registration at door
Sign up as soon as possible!

For more information and registration,
please email: Landau9@optonline.net
fax at 908 352 7395

write to:
JDSR
PO Box 2005,
NY, NY 10159-2005

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Employment Opportunity
Secondary Science Teacher
Idaho School for the Deaf and the Blind (ISDB)
Gooding, Idaho
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SECONDARY TEACHER FOR DEAF AND HARD OF HEARING/SCIENCE

Starting Date: August 2005

Salary Range: Commensurate with education and experience

Benefits: Comprehensive fringe benefit package

Desired Qualifications:
* Idaho Teacher Certification for Deaf and Hard of Hearing or equivalent
* One or more science endorsements
* Additional endorsements are beneficial
* Excellent receptive and expressive skills in American Sign Language
* Minimum of Bachelor's Degree Master's degree preferred
* Experience teaching deaf and/or blind children preferred
* Experience teaching subjects outside of endorsement areas preferred

Duties:
* Assumes responsibility for providing a quality science program
* Maintains discipline within the classroom
* Works with teachers to develop a continuum of educational activities throughout the curriculum
* Attends IEP meetings and other meetings required for the delivery of educational services
* Participates in committees and other job related activities
* Other duties as assigned

Application Procedures:
Submit the following to:
Human Resources Department
Idaho School for the Deaf and the Blind
1450 Main Street
Gooding, Idaho 83330
* Letter of application
* Copies of certification
* Three letters of recommendation
* Official transcripts
* Resume

Deadline: Open until filled

Location:
* Idaho School for the Deaf and the Blind is located in Gooding, Idaho (population 3,500); a small agricultural community located in south central Idaho within a short distance to mountains, rivers and related outdoor activities. The city of Gooding is a quiet family oriented community. For more information about Idaho School for the Deaf and the Blind check our website at: www. Isdb.state.id.us

For more information contact:
* Human resources Department at 208-934-4457 (Voice/TTY) or email sherry.hann@isdb.idaho.gov

Successful candidate will be required to furnish a background check within three months of employment as per Idaho Code 33-130.

Hiring is done without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, gender, age or disability. In addition, preference may be given to veterans who qualify under state and federal laws and regulations. If you need special accommodations to satisfy testing requirements, please contact the Human resources Department.

Idaho School for the Deaf and the Blind (ISDB)

Serving Deaf, Hard of Hearing, Blind and Visually Impaired Students of Idaho since 1906

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- Contact Information and Disclaimers
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