Volume 26 Issue 5

HOH-LD-News
Vol. 26, Issue 5
January 28, 2006

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Table of Contents
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- Article 1: TV Closed Captioning: The First 25 Years & the Future - Part 1

- Article 2: Plastic Slides Pose Problem

- Article 3: Tuba low notes are music to ears of deaf children

- Article 4: Short Takes

Our advertisers make it possible for us to provide HOH-LD-News as a free service. Please let them know you appreciate their support, and please mention that you saw their message in HOH-LD-News.

- Advertisers in this Issue
First Premium Placement: Sound Clarity Hearing Batteries and ALDs
Second Premium Placement: A Double Valentine's Gift from Harris Communications
Third Premium Placement: IHHD Online Educational Opportunities
Fourth Premium Placement:
NAD "Eye on Washington"
Hearing Loss Web "In the News"
Classified Section: One Smoke Alarm, one Online Store, and two Employment Opportunities

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Contact information and disclaimers are at the end of this newsletter.
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- Article 1: TV Closed Captioning: The First 25 Years & the Future - Part 1
By Cheryl Heppner
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Editor: It seems hard to believe that television closed captioning is only 25 years old! Television was pretty much inaccessible to people with hearing loss before that time. Jeff Hutchins, the Chairman of the Accessible Media Industry Coalition, provided a great review of captioning history at the 2005 TDI convention. Cheryl Heppner of NVRC did her usual great job of capturing his presentation.

This article is presented in two parts. This is part one.

If you want to share this information, be sure to credit NVRC. Attribution information is at the end of the article.

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Jeff Hutchins did a solo for the final presentation at the TDI Conference in New Orleans when his fellow presenter, Deborah Schuster, was unable to attend due to illness. Both Jeff and Deborah once worked together at WGBH. Jeff, who has been involved with captioning since 1973, gave a colorful history lesson.

- We're celebrating the 25th anniversary of closed captioning, but this isn't really accurate. Although March 15, 1980 was the first day that individuals could buy a caption decoder, and March 16, 1980 marked the first TV programs broadcast with captions, a great deal of experimentation had been done before that.

- The story begins with open captioning. It was first applied to films in the 1950s that were made available to deaf organizations. Dr. Malcolm Norwood of the Dept. of Health, Education and Welfare dreamed of having captioned TV, but he had to prove it was feasible. Dr. Norwood got the ear of WGBH, which was proud of its history of innovation, and of a particular individual named Phil Collier.

- In 1972, WGBH began captioning with 26 episodes of The French Chef with Julia Child. People called the station to ask about the captions, and when the WGBH staff explained that it was to help people who couldn't hear the audio, the callers would say, "Okay, that makes a lot of sense."

- The French Chef was not really challenging to caption with the pace and the settings. A greater challenge was to find a way to display the captions. Computers back then were huge. WGBH decided to use a character generator that normally was used to display the credits at the end of the show.

- With this resolved, they decided to tackle a bigger challenge. They wanted to do something that was almost live. In January 1973, they were able to get an advance copy of Nixon's inauguration address from the White House and used that to provide captions for the broadcast.

- Their next challenge was to attempt to caption something with more than one speaker. What deaf people said they most wanted was news, so WGBH decided to attempt captions for ABC News Tonight.

- Julius Barnathan, the chief of broadcasting at ABC, got behind the effort. With funding from the Department of Education, commercials were replaced with news for and about deaf people - weather, sports, etc. The 6:30 pm program was rebroadcast on PBS at 11 pm, giving the WBGH crew just four hours to put the captioning together.

- WGBH's next target was children. They developed a multi-linguistic project in 1975 for 7 to 8 year olds to try to reach deaf children.

- In the early years, they didn't do verbatim captions. The goal was to make captioning accessible to all, so they rewrote captions from the 180 words per minute spoken by newscasters to 120 words per minute.

- Julius Barnathan was supportive of closed captioning. The Department of Education gave funding to PBS in a 1973 contract, and engineers under John Ball started to work on development.

- TV receivers in 1973 were not sophisticated as they are now, so they had strict standards and had to run interference tests on line 21, putting on data to see what would happen.

- In 1976, WGBH went to the Federal Communications Commission and requested the use of line 21. Approval was granted the same year, so development of closed captioning continued.

- Now WGBH had to figure out how to create caption data to insert into the TV signal and recover the data from the signal, and then have a character generator to print the captions on the screen. The five different pieces of the puzzle took three years to develop.

- They went to the Department of Education for funding, but ABC said they didn't want programs prepared by a PBS station. A new strategy was to go to Congress and ask for funding to set up a National Captioning Institute (NCI). Mike Curzan was hired, and he assembled the pieces of a private corporation, which became NCI. All patents held by PBS were awarded to NCI, which opened and began hiring in 1979 with John Ball as its head.

- NCI's first office was set up in the DC area, and a second in Los Angeles. On March 17, after its first program, NCI hired Jeff to develop the ability to caption live programs. Another person hired was Carl Jensema, who is deaf.

- Encoders would only work with pre-recorded programs. NCI sought a way to create live captioning data. It also worked to keep the original coalition together - PBS, NCI, Sanyo (manufacturer of the decoders), and Texas Instruments (manufacturer of the circuits).

- It was hard to keep the coalition because by 1982 it became obvious that the number of decoders sold was far off the projection. In two years, only 40,000 to 50,000 had been sold. These first decoders cost $300 and consumers felt the cost was too high when there were so few programs to watch.

- In 1980, when the decoders first hit the market, there were only 15 hours of captioned programs each week. It cost $2,200 per hour to caption a program. NBC was about ready to back off from captioning, and CBS still wasn't doing any because it wanted to use a competing technology.

- After the first 100,000 decoders were sold, NCI took the opportunity to fix flaws that had been identified in the earlier ones. They created new specifics and added a remote control in 1984.

- In 1985, there were 60 hours of captioning each week and entrepreneurs began entering the picture to compete with NCI and WGBH, for captioning business. Captions Inc., Realtime Captions Inc. and VITAC were among the competitors, followed by others. Prices dropped. The captions were very high quality work because everyone was competing for contracts. Caption Colorado entered the business, targeting captioning for local stations.

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(c)2005 by Northern Virginia Resource Center for Deaf and Hard of Hearing Persons (NVRC), www.nvrc.org. When sharing this information, please ensure credit is given to NVRC

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A Double Valentine's Gift from Harris Communications
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To celebrate Valentine's Day, all novelties are 10% off at Harris Communications! Plus, if you order $50 or more you will receive free shipping --- that's a double savings for you! (Both offers expire Feb 15th. Shipping applies only to UPS ground shipments in the continental US.)

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- Article 2: Plastic Slides Pose Problem
By Eric Hand
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Editor: What does a plastic slide have to do with hearing loss? And what kind of problem could it pose? Here's the surprising answer!

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Six-year-old Taylor Zinderski slid down a plastic slide and slipped into silence.

It was October at a church playground in Chesterfield. Taylor, deaf for almost two years, ran to her father. She told him her cochlear implant - an electronic device that lets her hear - had suddenly fizzled.

It had been zapped by a static electric shock. Chris Zinderski hadn't switched off his daughter's implant because he didn't believe that static could really be a problem.

"Now I've learned my lesson," he said.

The shock didn't ruin Taylor's implant, but it did require an inconvenient trip to an audiologist. Static electricity is so much of a worry and hassle for the deaf that Washington University electrical engineer Robert Morley has a grant to study one of its main sources: plastic playground slides.

As playground slides evolve from metal to durable, cheap and colorful PVC plastic, deaf children face a sad choice: Don't play, or turn off their implants and play without sound.

Some playgrounds, such as new "all inclusive" ones in Forest Park and Blanchette Park in St. Charles, have deliberately included metal slides, which don't produce static electricity. But many others don't - such as one in St. Peters City Centre Park that was supposed to be accessible to disabled children when it opened in October.

"Every time I look, there's another we can't go to," said Peg Jones, the mainstream coordinator at St. Joseph Institute for the Deaf in Chesterfield.

In the name of science

Morley, who helped pioneer digital hearing aids, got a small federal grant to study the issue. His first task: See how much static a slide can make.

He sent his two daughters down St. Louis-area plastic slides hundreds of times, wearing different clothes.

Static electricity occurs when a "positive" material sheds electrons by rubbing a "negative" material that attracts them. Good static-producing combinations include wool and PVC plastic, hair and rubber, and skin and polyester. Cotton, paper and steel are neutral.

The resulting charge on both objects can dissipate slowly in humid air, or cause a shock if it touches something that is grounded, such as a person, a car - or the metal pole that Morley had his daughters touch after each slide.

"After a couple of times they were like, 'Dad, no.'" he said. Morley soon realized that the charge on his daughters would leak out naturally through their stocking feet.

The type of clothes and length of the slide didn't matter much. But humidity did. In the cold, dry air of winter, Morley's daughters achieved charges of around 10,000 volts. Morley says that in the dry air of Tucson, Ariz., a colleague measured 20,000 volts after a slide.

In coming months, he will apply those voltages to test implants - which are currently rated to withstand 8,000 volts, according to Doug Miller, an engineer with Cochlear Americas, one of the manufacturers of the devices.

Static in every room

Cochlear implants can cost more than $50,000. They require a delicate surgery to insert a wire into the snail shell-shaped cochlea. A hearing aid outside the ear picks up sound and converts it to an electrical signal that is broadcast through the skin to the internal device, which electrically stimulates the auditory nerve.

Miller and Morley both stress that static electricity is not a threat to the internal part of the implant. It can only zap the external equipment and force a trip to the audiologist for recalibration.

Miller says it will soon be a nonissue, as deaf people move to newer implants that can withstand more static. New rules by the Food and Drug Administration will require a rating to 15,000 volts and most companies test the devices at even higher levels, he says.

But until then, each room at the Moog Center for Deaf Education in St. Louis County will keep a bottle of diluted fabric softener for spraying down staticky kids and carpets. On a cold November morning, family school director Betsy Brooks stood guard at the entrance and watched for signs of static.

She said: "I was like, 'Oh, no, we have a problem - because I could see their hair standing on end.' I said, 'Get those spray bottles.'"

During recess out on a wood and metal playground, the children played freely with their implants turned on. Taylor sailed down the metal slide, her mop of curly blond hair bouncing in the air.

Jones feels sorry for the children who have to turn their implants off.

"It's a completely different experience to go down the slide without the wind and the 'whee,'" she said.

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You're Career Oriented... Career Driven...and Hard of Hearing or Deaf
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The Institute for Persons Who Are Hard of Hearing or Deaf (IHHD) is a nonprofit Congressionally-funded agency dedicated to facilitating workplace and career advancement for aspiring professionals like you.

IHHD provides important online educational opportunities to share experiences, access top professional leaders, and develop crucial communication and business skills. Choose from a number of programs that cover all aspects of career growth - from starting a business to leadership and advocacy development.

These month-long courses are delivered online using National University's acclaimed state-of-the-art interactive learning system to provide optimal accessibility. Visit: http://cha.nu.edu/ec/formihhd-careerdev.html?ypd002
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- Article 3: Tuba low notes are music to ears of deaf children
By Steve Giegerich
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Editor: If you're able to listen to music, you may have a favorite instrument or two. For many people it would be an instrument that produces low-frequency notes, because their low-frequency hearing is better than their high-frequency hearing. It's no wonder kids with hearing loss like the tuba!

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The first time Michael Sanders and his tuba performed at the Central Institute for the Deaf, the students "listened" to the music by placing their hands on the bell of his instrument to feel the vibrations. That was years ago, before medical technology forever altered the way the deaf learn and live.

On Monday, when Sanders executed a deliberately flawed G below Middle C to introduce the tuba to a roomful of pre-kindergartners at the institute, the students jumped at once with a startled gasp followed by muffled squeals of delight.

Sanders, who in 15 years with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra has played in major concert venues around the world, was equally thrilled.

"To see those little kids look up with that look on their faces was unbelievable," he said, recalling his previous performance at the institute. "It's music, we had an audience and this became their concert hall."

Through its Community Partnerships Program, orchestra members perform in various permutations - string quartets and the like - in nearly 300 concerts throughout the region for free or at a nominal charge each year. At least a third of those performances are at schools.

Even institute director Robin Feder acknowledged, however, that an appearance at a school for the deaf seems, at least initially, counterintuitive.

Enter Jim Meyer, composer, 40-year veteran of the Symphony's clarinet section and the husband of Virginia, the institute's school nurse.

To Jim Meyer, an audience united by music becomes a family. And it is not a family, he believes, exclusively for those in the hearing world.

So, in the spirit of narrative children's classics such as Prokofiev's "Peter and the Wolf" and Saint-Saens' "Carnival of the Animals," Meyer last year composed a 25-minute piece for violin, cello, French horn and clarinet that revolves around a mischievous tuba.

With his audience in mind, Meyer composed "Tuffy, the Silly Tuba" in a low register, summoning tonal reverberations perceptible to children with a limited or low hearing range.

"For little kids with hearing problems, the highs are very difficult, so, for a listening mechanism, we stayed away from that," Meyer said. He believes "Tuffy" may be the only piece of music ever composed specifically for "children of the silent world."

Virginia Meyer, who was cast by her husband as narrator of "Tuffy," credits medical research and technology for helping students with hearing disabilities develop an appreciation for music at the same pace as the hearing population.

A Missouri infant testing program helps identify babies with hearing problems and allows them to receive hearing aids at six months. And cochlear implants, which stimulate hearing and speech, can be surgically attached to the inner ear in children as young as 2.

The result: Unlike Sanders' experience during his first visit, students at the institute are better able to feel the music in the true and intended sense.

"It probably means even more to them" said Feder, "because it is so exciting for them to hear any sound."

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Eye on Washington
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Stay informed and protect your rights! The Eye on
Washington (EOW) is a national advocacy ezine published by
the National Association of the Deaf (NAD) that focuses on
activities occuring on Capitol Hill that affect deaf and
hard of hearing civil rights.

The EOW is open to all, members and non-members. It is
distributed once a month, sometimes more.
http://www.nad.org/eNewsletters

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"In The News" - HLW Provides Ongoing Hearing Loss News Coverage
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Hearing Loss Web (Publisher of HOH-LD-News) is thrilled to announce a new chapter on our website. Called "In the News", this section will keep you current with what's happening in the hearing loss world between weekly issues of HOH-LD-News.

We're using the same editorial discretion about what stories to include on "In the News" as we do for stories to include in HOH-LD-News. So what you'll see are the hearing loss stories that we think are important!

If you like the HOH-LD-News story selection, you'll like the "In the News" story selection.

Don't forget to bookmark:
http://www.hearinglossweb.com/news/curr.htm
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- Article 4: Short Takes
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Editor: As hearing loss becomes more of a mainstream topic we're seeing an increasing amount of press coverage of related issues. We don't have room to run all these stories, but we can pick a few interesting ones, and provide an excerpt and a link to the complete story. We'd sure like to know if you like this idea or not! ;-)

Oh, and if you like this format, you might want to check out the new section of our website that provides stories in this format on an ongoing basis. See
http://www.hearinglossweb.com/news/curr.htm

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The Future of Wireless Devices in Hearing Care

"Wireless is here to stay and has the potential to significantly affect the provision of hearing care. Hearing aids equipped with wireless systems will solve many of the most common issues encountered by hearing aid wearers-telephone use, noise, and listening problems associated with distance and reverberation. They may also someday enhance binaural processing and offer a means by which a hearing aid can learn how best to deal with the ever changing acoustic environment. Ultimately, wireless devices may foster the convergence of the normal-hearing and hard-of-hearing markets and potentially redefine the way hearing care is provided. It's an exciting time; stay tuned."
http://www.hearingreview.com/Articles.ASP?articleid=H0601F01

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Finding the Right Headphones

What's interesting is that your choice of headphones can actually help your hearing, as opposed to damaging it. Consider some of the typical places people use headphones: on a train or bus while commuting, walking through a city or college, traveling in a car (hopefully not while driving), or traveling on an airplane. Many of these places are loud environments, especially those that involve trains, buses, and airplanes. People who use headphones in these kinds of places tend to turn up the volume louder than they normally would, to drown out the sounds around them. They're in even more danger of losing or damaging their hearing.
http://www.connectedhomemag.com/Mobile/Articles/Index.cfm?ArticleID=49177

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Genetics and Hearing Loss: An Overview

Knowing the exact cause of a child's hearing loss can assist clinicians and parents in making decisions regarding treatment and educational options. It may surprise some parents to know that more than half of all children who are born deaf or who become deaf very early in life have a genetic cause for their hearing loss. In fact, recent studies have revealed that approximately 50-60% of moderate to profound, congenital, or early-onset hearing loss is genetic. The remaining 40-50% of hearing loss is due to non-genetic effects, such as maternal infection (CMV or rubella), prematurity, postnata infection (meningitis, otitis media), ototoxic drugs, or acoustic/ cranial trauma.
http://makeashorterlink.com/?P3EE2148C

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- Classifieds
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One Smoke Alarm, one Online Store, and two Employment Opportunities appear in this issue. (Ads appear after this brief table of contents.)

Smoke Alarm for Hearing Impaired
Low Frequency Alarm Tone
www.loudenlow.com

WCI - Your Single Source for Assistive Technology
Pocketalker on Sale During February
http://www.weitbrecht.com

Employment Opportunity 1
Various Opportunities
GLAD
Various Southern California Locations

Employment Opportunity 2
Assistant Professor - English with Deaf Specialization
Mesa College
San Diego, CA

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Smoke Alarm for Hearing Impaired
Low Frequency Alarm Tone
www.loudenlow.com
-------------------

Many hearing impaired people are not awakened by the high frequency of typical smoke alarms. The Loudenlow(tm) smoke alarm can be heard by people with moderate hearing loss. It emits a powerful, LOW FREQUENCY alarm tone and "packs a bigger punch". Uses big speaker and built-in amplifier. Built with pride in the U.S.A.

- Battery powered
- Easy wall mount, no wiring
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- Purchase at www.loudenlow.com and receive $5.00 discount or find us with Google by typing "low frequency smoke alarms"
- 30 day return policy and 3 year limited warranty

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WCI - Your Single Source for Assistive Technology
Pocketalker on Sale During February
http://www.weitbrecht.com
-------------------

Pocketalker just $99.00!

Have you been missing out on hearing parts of your favorite television shows or conversations with your family and friends? We can help! With the Pocket Talker personal amplifier you can hear practically everywhere. And during February it's just $99.00! Whether you are at that noisy Super Bowl party or a quite romantic restaurant with your Valentine, you won't miss a thing.

Call us now at 1-800-233-9130 (V/TTY) or visit us online at http://www.weitbrecht.com (use code WCI206H when ordering).

To get a copy of our NEW catalog by emailing your request to: sales@weitbrecht.com.

WCI. Your Single Source for Assistive Technology

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Employment Opportunity 1
Various Opportunities
GLAD
Various Southern California Locations
-------------------

JOB OPPORTUNITIES AT GLAD

GLAD is an Affirmative Action Employer with equal opportunity for men, women and people with disabilities. For more information on the following positions, please go to: www.gladinc.org. The status of all positions is: Regular, Full-time, Non-Exempt, Full Fringe Benefits unless otherwise noted. All positions are open until filled.

* JOB DEVELOPER/INTERPRETER - Anaheim, Crenshaw, Norwalk

* HARD OF HEARING SPECIALIST - Riverside

* HIV HEALTH EDUCATOR (MSM) - Los Angeles

* LIFESIGNS DISPATCHER - Los Angeles

* GLAD BUILDING/MAINTENANCE MANAGER - Los Angeles

If interested for any of these positions then please submit resume and application to:

Jeff Fetterman
Human Resources Specialist
Greater Los Angeles Agency on Deafness, Inc.
2222 Laverna Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90041
V/TDD: (323) 550-4207
Fax #: (323)550-4204
E-mail: jfetterman@gladinc.org

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Employment Opportunity 2
Assistant Professor - English with Deaf Specialization
Mesa College
San Diego, CA
-------------------

Assistant Professor-English with a Specialization in Teaching Deaf Students at San Diego Mesa College. 10 month, full time, tenure track position Fall 2006. Application deadline February 26, 2006.

See www.sdccd.net/employment/ go to: Current Openings (Academic, Mesa College); Assistant Professor-English with a Specialization in Teaching Deaf Students; download application forms; job flyer, etc. Minimum Qualifications in English or ESL or equivalent.

See www.cccregistry.org go to link for minimum qualifications. Additional information may be requested from SDCCD Human Resources Employment Office at (619)388-6580 (voice) or (619)388-6896 (TDD)

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- Contact Information and Disclaimers
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