Volume 40 Issue 1

HOH-LD-News
Vol. 40, Issue 1
July 4, 2009

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Table of Contents
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- Article 1: HLAA 2009 Convention Opening Session

- Article 2: COAT Applauds Representative Markey's Accessibility Bill

- Article 3: Comprompter Unveils All-Purpose Captioning System

- 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:
YOUR AD HERE
Second Premium Placement:
Cellphone Headsets and Neckloops on Sale
Third Premium Placement:
Hearing Aid Repairs from Hearing Haven
Classified Section:
One Online Store, one Hearing Aid Liner, and three Employment Opportunities

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Contact information and disclaimers are at the end of this newsletter.
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If you're interested in getting your message out to people who are hard of hearing or late deafened, and to the people who serve them, you might consider a premium ad in this newsletter! Our rates are surprisingly affordable and we reach the movers and shakers in the hearing loss world. And this newsletter (unlike some of the others) is strictly "opt-in", which means that everyone who receives it WANTS to receive it!

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- Article 1: HLAA 2009 Convention Opening Session
By Cheryl Heppner
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Editor: It's that time of year again! The start of Hearing Loss Convention Season! As is normally the case, HLAA kicks off the activity in June. Char and I didn't attend this year, but super reporters extraordinaire Cheryl Heppner and Bonnie O'Leary from NVRC will be providing detailed coverage of the activities.

More coverage of this great convention is at: http://www.hearinglossweb.com/res/hlorg/shhh/cn/2009/2009.htm

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Welcomes, Greetings and Thanks

The opening session was held on Thursday June 18 in the huge Tennessee CDE Ballroom with what had to be the longest stage in the history of HLAA conventions.

Capt. Mark Brogan, who was recently featured in Hearing Loss magazine, led the audience in the pledge of allegiance to officially begin the Opening Session.

President of the Board of Trustees Michael Stone recognized numerous groups and asked them to stand and be applauded, including fellow members of the Board of Trustees, chapter delegates, state chapter coordinators, and state leaders.

Kevin Colwell, representing opening session sponsor Ultratec on behalf of Founder/President Rob Engelke, shared Rob's regrets. It was the first time in 20 years that Rob has missed an HLAA convention. Colwell noted that for 35 years Ultratec has developed products for people with hearing loss, including its CapTel. He thanked the many HLAA attendees for their feedback, which he said has inspired the company in developing and improving its products. HLAA, he said, gives Ultratec the opportunity to learn from people who freely share their daily lives.

Michael Stone thanked the many volunteers from Nashville and introduced Jennifer Thorpe of the local host committee, who recognized committee chairs Jim and Kathy as well as Sherry and Karyn. Local volunteers at this conference are patient, smile easily, and can be identified by their red vests. Jennifer encouraged attendees to take advantage of local attractions such as the dinner cruises, shopping (there's a mall adjacent to the Gaylord), history sites, and features like the Country Music Hall of Fame.

Update on HLAA Activities

Executive Director Brenda Battat listed many of the organization's recent accomplishments such as:
- Working with the Obama administration
- Working on passage of the Hearing Aid Tax Credit
- Activating to get captioned telephone services mandated nationally
- Pushing the Department of Transportation for more accessible air travel
- Working with Consumer Reports to develop its articles on hearing aids
- Getting the National Fire Alarm Code to include mandatory low-frequency square wave alarms

Brenda recognized an alphabet soup of collaborators who have worked with HLAA toward common goals, including NTID, DRF, TDI, Gallaudet University, NVRC and NCRA

Brenda shared her delight at the number of young adults present and involved with HLAA. She thanked individuals who have kept HLAA afloat through their financial support. Three years ago volunteers began the Walk4Hearing, and this year there will be 22 walks across the U.S. Brenda thanked all the volunteers who participated, the sponsors, and the developers of HLAA website video about the walk.

A New Program for Veterans

Brenda Battat introduced Dr. T. Alan Hurwitz, President of the National Technical Institute of the Deaf, Alan Ford of the Veterans Administration and Larry Scott representing an organization serving veterans. The occasion was the announcement of a partnership by HLAA and RIT/NTID to serve veterans who have experienced hearing loss while serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. The program will include assisting them in locating career opportunities and helping them adjust to life with hearing loss. Onstage, as we watched, Brenda and Alan signed an official agreement.

Barbara Kelley brought Capt. Mark Brogan back to the stage, this time accompanied by his wife Sunny. Barbara said that Mark, now retired, has now replaced his shoulder boards with two pins engraved "suivez moi" - follow me. Mark has been featured on the veterans page at the HLAA website. The explosion set off by a suicide bomber which caused Mark's hearing loss also caused a brain injury.

Mark said that an estimated 50,000 veterans have hearing loss and it is a significant health care issue which requires commitment from all parties to be sure that veterans will be successful. Three years ago, when he was at Walter Reed hospital doing his physical therapy, he knew that he couldn't hear well. He remembered that when soldiers reached him he had blood pouring out of both ears. He received his first pair of hearing aids and realized how much he had taken hearing for granted. Mark had been a musician, and the double whammy of hearing loss and brain injury now meant that he might not hear due to the hearing loss and might not understand what he was hearing due to the brain injury.

During his recovery, Mark has learned to be an advocate. He did not want to sit and feel sorry for himself. Instead he has found it rewarding to work with others in an organization. He came across HLAA, got involved in a chapter, and learned from the experiences of the other members. He is committed to serving other veterans with hearing loss. For Mark's feature with a photo: http://www.hearingloss.org/veterans/featuredvet.asp.

Advocating for Veterans

Dr. Gene Beck, a former HLAA board member and Chair of the National Audiology and Speech Pathology Program at the Veterans Administration, gave his greetings. He said that "mild traumatic brain injury" (TBI) is a misnamed injury and is just beginning to be understood. It has far-reaching consequences in the daily lives of veterans.

Hearing loss and tinnitus are now the two disabilities most widely reported by veterans. Dr. Beck said that in the past year 750,000 veterans drew compensation for hearing loss and 600 for tinnitus. Last year 400,000 hearing aids were dispensed by the VA and costing many millions of dollars, plus millions for hearing aid batteries. In addition, 70 cochlear implants were paid for. Just as sobering was the news that one out of every seven hearing aids fitted last year in the U.S. were for veterans.

Dr. Beck thanked HLAA for its efforts to provide and promote hearing health care and asked that it continue its efforts.

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(c)2009 by Northern Virginia Resource Center for Deaf and Hard of Hearing Persons (NVRC), 3951 Pender Drive, Suite 130, Fairfax, VA 22030; www.nvrc.org. 703-352-9055 V, 703-352-9056 TTY, 703-352-9058 Fax. You do not need permission to share this information, but please be sure to credit NVRC.

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- Article 2: COAT Applauds Representative Markey's Accessibility Bill
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Editor: You probably know that accessibility laws often lag new technology by years, or even decades. A current example is the lack of legal requirements for Internet videos to be captioned. Representative Markey has introduced a bill to require those captions as well as many other accessibility features. Here's a press release from the Coalition of Organizations for Accessible Technology (COAT) with more information.

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The Coalition of Organizations for Accessible Technology (COAT) is very pleased that Representative Edward Markey (D-MA) has introduced the "Twenty-first Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act of 2009" (H.R. 3101). The bill would modernize the Communications Act by ensuring that new Internet-enabled telephone and television services are accessible to and usable by people with disabilities, and closes existing gaps in federal laws governing telecommunications access.

Jenifer Simpson, of the American Association of People with Disabilities (AAPD), said, "The time is now to safeguard an accessible communications future for people with disabilities as the nation embraces new broadband and Internet technologies. AAPD applauds Rep. Markey for his leadership. We look now to the Senate for similar leadership in addressing accessible communications technologies."

Karen Peltz Strauss, of Communication Service for the Deaf (CSD), said, "H.R. 3101 puts people with disabilities squarely into 21st century communications. This legislation builds on existing law and puts the U.S. at the forefront of innovations that will ensure that people with disabilities can take full advantage of Internet advancements enjoyed by everyone else."

Rosaline Crawford, of the National Association of the Deaf (NAD), noted that "Digital technologies make it possible for televisions and other video devices - of virtually any size - to receive, transmit, and display television programs and video clips with captions, so that people who are deaf and hard of hearing are not left behind. Captioning television programs and video clips that are shown on the Internet is needed for the same reasons captioning is needed when shown on television."

Mark Richert, of the American Foundation for the Blind (AFB), stated, "We are fed up with having to play catch up whenever new technologies are released. With enactment, people with vision loss will finally have access to everything from text messaging their friends, watching their favorite television shows, and receiving critical emergency alerts."

Eric Bridges, of the American Council of the Blind (ACB), stated, "Video description and accessible user interfaces on television devices are essential in providing information about events on screen for people who are blind or visually impaired. We've waited a long time for this." Video description is verbal depiction of key visual elements inserted into natural pauses in television dialogue and is activated by the viewer.

The bill includes the following specific measures:

Communications Access

* Requires access to phone-type equipment and services used over the Internet.
* Adds improved accountability and enforcement measures for accessibility, including a clearinghouse and reporting obligations by providers and manufacturers.
* Requires telephone products used with the Internet to be hearing aid compatible.
* Allows use of Lifeline and Link-up universal service funds (USF) for broadband services.
* Allocates up to $10 million/year from USF for equipment used by people who are deaf-blind.
* Clarifies the scope of relay services to include calls between and among people with disabilities and requires Internet-based voice communication service providers to contribute to the Interstate Relay Fund.
* Requires the FCC to establish a real-time text digital standard to replace the current TTY-to-TTY analog standard.

Video Programming Access

* Requires closed captioning decoder circuitry in all video programming devices.
* Extends the closed captioning obligations to television-type video programming distributed over the Internet: covers programming that would otherwise be covered by the FCC's captioning rules, not user-generated content.
* Requires easy access to closed captions via remote control and on-screen menus.
* Requires easy access by blind people to television controls and program selection menus.
* Restores video description rules and requires access to televised emergency programming for people who are blind or have low vision.

The Coalition of Organizations for Accessible Technology, or COAT, launched in March 2007, is a coalition of over 240 national, state and community-based organizations that advocates for full access by people with disabilities to evolving high speed broadband, wireless and Internet protocol (IP) technologies. More information is available on the COAT website at www.COATaccess.org.

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- Article 3: Comprompter Unveils All-Purpose Captioning System
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Editor: One of the roadblocks to widely available captioning is the difficulty associated with providing it. With so many potential audio sources, and so many potential caption and subtitle formats, it's really quite a complicated challenge. The folks at Comprompter have developed an application that addresses these issues - an All-Purpose Captioning System. Hopefully it will live up to the hype, and we'll see the system in wide use in the near future.

Here's their press release!

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One of the new products that Comprompter will unveil for the first time at NAB 2009 is "Caption Central"(tm) ... an All-Purpose Captioning System ... designed to provide multiple Captioning solutions for local broadcasters, which include: NewsRoom Computer Systems (NRCS), Keyboard Entry, Live Voice, pre-recorded audio and pre-stored text files.

Comprompter CEO, Ralph King said, "We have been developing Voice Recognition since 2005 but have taken this product beyond what anyone else is doing. Caption Central brings together nearly every conceivable Captioning situation and provides a built-in solution for it. We tried to imagine every normal and abnormal event and built Caption Central around those scenarios."

"We included almost every method of input: dictation, direct studio input, and audio pass-through; audio and text file ingest; as well as live keyboard entry.", King continued, "Caption Central is an extremely powerful tool for both Live and Production use".

Caption Central(tm) performs a context comparison and tries to select the most appropriate word when a conflict arises over which spelling of that word occurs. "Caption Central even does Spell-Checking and capitalizes proper names of 'people, places and things' it recognizes." King added, "Caption Central is a standalone system that can output captioning for our own NewsKing Newsroom system, or nearly any other newsroom system."

The Audio In feature allows a live studio voice, like weather or sports, to be fed into Caption Central and instantly turns their unscripted words into captioned text. "This is the most universal system of captioning that exists in the broadcast market today and we are proud to offer our fellow broadcasters the opportunity of really serving the hearing impaired community in the most complete and instantaneous way possible." said King.

About Comprompter News and Automation

Comprompter is a La Crosse, Wisconsin based company specializing in news and automation software for the broadcast and cable industry and services clients from worldwide with newsroom and automation systems along with auxiliary newsroom software for elections, closings, Internet newscast publishing, and close captioning.

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- Article 4: Short Takes
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Editor: Here are our picks of some additional stories that you may find interesting. For more, please point your browser to: http://www.hearinglossweb.com/news/curr.htm

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Cochlear Implants 2009

One of the recent innovations coming from some of the hearing loss conventions is the posting of the presentation slides for the workshops. HLAA has done this for the 2009 convention, and you can view the materials at http://hlaa.omnibooksonline.com/. One presentation that grabbed my interest was "Cochlear Implants 2009", presented by Susan Amberg, AuD, David Haynes, MD, and Tamala Bradham, PhD from the Vanderbilt Bill Wilkerson Center for Otolaryngology and Communication Sciences. It discusses all three implants in some detail, talks about candidacy criteria, and includes a section with pictures of the operation. That part may not be suitable for folks with weak stomachs! ;-)

http://hlaa.omnibooksonline.com/data/papers/022.pdf

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FCC Requests Comments on Mandatory Captioned Telephone Relay Service

The FCC is requesting comments on a proposal to make Captioned Telephone Relay Service (CTS) mandatory. CTS is the service of choice for many people with severe to profound hearing loss; for many people it is the closest thing to "functional equivalence" currently available, and we believe that it should be a required service. For the complete FCC notice, please point your browser to

http://hraunfoss.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/DA-09-1436A1.doc

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Studies Demonstrate Human Preference For Listening With Right Ear

In a series of three studies looking at ear preference in communication between humans, Dr. Luca Tommasi and Daniele Marzoli from the University "Gabriele d'Annunzio" have shown that a natural side bias, depending on hemispheric asymmetry in the brain, manifests itself in everyday human behavior. Their findings were just published online in the Springer Science journal Naturwissenschaften. One of the best known asymmetries in humans is the right ear dominance for listening to verbal stimuli, which is believed to reflect the brain's left hemisphere superiority for processing verbal information. However, until now, the majority of studies looking at ear preference in human communication have been controlled laboratory studies and there is very little published observational evidence of spontaneous ear dominance in everyday human behavior. Tommasi and Marzoli's three studies specifically observed ear preference during social interactions in noisy nightclub environments.

http://www.hearingreview.com/insider/2009-07-02_02.asp

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- Classifieds
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One Online Store, one Hearing Aid Liner, and three Employment Opportunities (Ads appear after this brief table of contents.)

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Employment Opportunity 1
Exciting Career Opportunities at GLAD
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Employment Opportunity 2
Various Employment Opportunities
Georgia School for the Deaf
Cave Spring, GA

Employment Opportunity 3
Total Communication/Auditory Oral Early Childhood Instructor of the Deaf and Hearing Impaired
Idaho School for the Deaf and the Blind
Nampa, Idaho

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Employment Opportunity 1
Exciting Career Opportunities at GLAD
Various Southern California Locations
-------------------

Exciting Career 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, Pacoima, Santa Ana, CA
* Community Interpreter (Two positions open) - Los Angeles, CA

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
Various Employment Opportunities
Georgia School for the Deaf
Cave Spring, GA
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Currently accepting applications for the following positions:

Assistant Director for Residential Services - see http://www.hearinglossweb.com/res/emp/gsd2.htm
Assistant Director of Instruction (12 mth. position)
Teacher - Graduation Coach (10 mth. position)
Teacher - High School Math (10 mth. position)*
Teacher - Middle School Language Arts (10 mth. position)*
Teacher - Middle School Science (10 mth. position)*
Teacher - Reading Content Specialist - Pre K-12 (10 mth. position)*
Accountant Paraprofessional (12 mth. position)
Housekeeper (12 mth. position)
Job Coach (hourly paid)
Instructor - Residential Services (12 mth. position)
Residential Advisor (10 mth. position)*
Secretary I (12 mth. position)
Speech Language Pathologist (10 mth. position)*
Substitute Teachers (hourly paid, based on credentials)
Systems Support Tech (IT Assistant) (12 mth. position)*

* 10 month employees work 200 days (10 months) but receive payroll checks during each of the 12 months of the year.

For more information about these positions, visit the Georgia Department of Education web site at http://www.doe.k12.ga.us/pea_hr_jobsearch.aspx

Download Job Applications at:
http://www.spa.ga.gov/word/jobinfo/stateapp-emp.doc

Completed applications may be mailed, e-mailed, or faxed to:

Denise Clark, Personnel Office
Georgia School for the Deaf
232 Perry Farm Rd. SW
Cave Spring, Georgia 30124
denise.clark@doe.k12.ga.us
Fax: (706) 777-2240

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Employment Opportunity 3
Total Communication/Auditory Oral Early Childhood Instructor of the Deaf and Hearing Impaired
Idaho School for the Deaf and the Blind
Nampa, Idaho
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Begin Date: August 2009

Nature of Work: Develop and implement a continuum of educational activities for D/HH preschool age children; develop IEP goals and attend other meetings required for the delivery of educational services; teach one session of total communication and one session of auditory oral preschool; other duties as assigned.

Minimum Qualifications: Idaho Standard Exceptional Child Certification with a Hearing Impaired Endorsement; Early Childhood Endorsement preferred; Experience teaching deaf children in Total Communication/Auditory Oral Settings; Bachelor's degree required, Master's degree preferred.

Salary: Commensurate with education and experience.

Benefits: Comprehensive fringe benefit package included.

To Apply: Interested persons are to submit a letter of application, resume, official transcripts, copies of certification and three letters of recommendations to:

Idaho School for the Deaf and the Blind
ATTN: Human Resources
1450 Main St
Gooding, ID 83330

Location: Parkview Early Learning Center, Nampa, Idaho

Closing Date: Open until filled.

Successful candidate will be required to furnish a background check within three months of employment 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 regulation. If you need special accommodation to satisfy testing requirements, please contact the Human Resources Department.

Department of Human Resources, 1450 Main St, Gooding, ID 83330 208.934.4457

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- Contact Information and Disclaimers
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