Advocacy - Current Issues

State Advisory Boards Representing People who are Hard of Hearing

Consumers with hearing loss can and should be on state advisory boards to represent the needs of people who are hard of hearing and improve services across the state.

Most advisory boards have slots allocated for consumer and/or specific disability representation. This is to ensure that the agencies have input from the widest range of constituencies. As a consumer on the advisory board you can make sure that the services being provided are appropriate and adequate for people with hearing loss.

There are two main types of state agencies that have advisory boards:

We strongly encourage people with hearing loss to get on both types of advisory boards to play an active role in raising awareness about hearing loss issues and improving state services for people with hearing loss.

Membership on the boards is usually through appointment by the state governor. It is therefore important to play an active role at the state level in order for people to get to know you and your expertise so that they can nominate you to be appointed.

Hints To Get You Started:


Google Announces Automatic Captions on YouTube

Every minute of every day, 20 hours of videos are uploaded to YouTube. It’s hard to imagine so much uncaptioned video all in one place.

On November 19, 2009, Brenda Battat, Executive Director of Hearing Loss Association, and Lise Hamlin, Director of Public Policy & State Development were invited to attend the official announcement by Google and YouTube of the launching of innovative software that will make more captioning available via YouTube. Thanks to this new software, whenever a video is uploaded to YouTube, the video owner now has an option to easily add captions. The software automatically creates time-coded captions for the text of the audio quickly, easily and for free. Those captions add value to videos: videos with captions are searchable by text. That’s good not just for people with hearing loss, it’s good for anyone who wants their video to be found on Internet.

Google has also found a way for viewers to get captions on videos already uploaded to YouTube. A viewer will be able to click on a key that says “transcribe audio.” That command will add captions to videos they want to see when they want to see it. This clever technique provides one answer to the question, how anyone possibly caption every video on YouTube? It’s all done by machine. It uses voice recognition technology to automatically caption, or “auto-caption” the video.

Google and YouTube are in the “beta testing” phase with 13 educational partners. Because viewer-added captioning relies on speech recognition technology, the captions are not yet perfect. In fact, Google admitted to a 20% error rate, far below the 2% error rate we have come to expect from good caption writers on broadcast television. YouTube videos that have music or noise or environmental sounds in the background will be even more problematic for accurate automatic captions.

Still, it’s a huge leap forward for captioning on the Internet. According to Brenda Battat, Executive Director of Hearing Loss Association, “This is unprecedented because of the scale, it’s been done without mandates, and it’s free.”

The passion of the Google team was evident at the event in Washington DC on November 13. Ken Harrenstien, the software engineer who helped develop the automatic captioning system and who is deaf, indicated the technology has never been applied on such a large scale. “This is some thing that I have dreamt of for many years,” Mr. Harrenstien said at the event.

Someday, we do hope to see voice recognition software create more accurate captions. When the next American Idol video goes viral, we’d love to see the captioned version right from the start. In the meantime, the fact that Google and YouTube have put their weight behind captioning is a terrific development. We expect to see more and more video creators and producers understanding the value of searchable text captions that we can all enjoy.

Read more about it on Google's blog:
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/11/automatic-captions-in-youtube.html

http://www.youtube.com/t/captions_about

Full Accessibility for People with Hearing Loss: Are We There Yet?
November 10, 2009

Next year, 2010, we will reach the 20th Anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), the civil rights law for people with disabilities. It’s time to ask: are the barriers gone, have we reached full accessibility for all people all the time? The answer: I don’t think so.

One of the problems in reaching for full accessibility for people with hearing loss is that we are not one monolithic group: there is no one easy answer, no one accommodation that suits us all. It is time to make it clear we need to ensure full access for all. It is time for the following of best practices to become the norm. Some of these go beyond current federal law.

Best Practices
These Best Practices are for individuals or organizations advocating for greater accessibility, or for agencies, businesses and organizations reaching out to the community to ensure participation by greater numbers of people with hearing loss in their events and meetings. These Best Practices are based on the principle that whenever and wherever information is provided orally, it should also be accessible to the widest audience possible.

  1. Whether or not a public address system is used, at a minimum, CART (Communication Access Real-Time Translation), Assistive Listening Devices (ALDs) and sign language interpreters must be provided.
  2. In situations where a specific accommodation has been requested by an individual, the individual’s request should be honored.
  3. A dedicated stream of funding should be established to provide any and all accommodations and services needed.
  4. Staff must be trained so they will have a basic understanding of providing accommodations:
    1. the various accommodations available
    2. how and where to make requests to put the accommodations in place for both technology and services
    3. how to ensure proper set-up for the best use of the technology and services
    4. how to ensure that technology is maintained in good working order
  1. When an agency provides direct services to people who are hard of hearing or deaf, some or all of the staff must have a clear understanding of current technology used and issues faced by people who are hard of hearing who use their voice and residual hearing. This is in addition to staff fluent in sign language who can communicate directly with people who use sign language.
  2. When promoting events, it should be clear on all publicity that all of these accommodations will be used and available to attendees.
  3. Signage must be provided at the event indicating the type of communication access in place.

How To Advocate for Better Classroom Acoustics

Unnecessary noise interferes with our children’s education. Children with temporary hearing loss (because of colds and earaches) or permanent hearing loss are especially at risk from excessive noise and reverberation in their classrooms.

A standard for classroom acoustics, ANSI/ASA S12.60-2002, was developed by the Acoustical Society of America working with the US Access Board, parents, teachers, the Hearing Loss Association of America, and the Alexander Graham Bell Association for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing. It was published by the American National Standards Institute and spells out maximum levels for background noise and reverberation to ensure good speech intelligibility in learning environments.

What to Do
Learn about the issues by reading the information sheets provided:

Know where to get the standard and other resources. Information on ordering the standard, other materials on classroom acoustics, including a videotape, design manuals, and a bibliography, are available at www.access-board.gov/acoustic.

There is also a toll-free technical assistance line at 1-800-872-2253 voice and 1-800-993-2822 TTY.

Contact school officials in your community and educate them on the importance of implementing the standard when new schools are built.

Meet with PTAs to educate them about the standard and get their support.

Meet with local and state architectural firms to ensure that they incorporate the standard into school building designs.

Educate parents and teachers about the importance of good acoustics and get them to advocate for the standard also.

Parents have found the standard useful in obtaining acoustic modifications to their children’s existing classrooms under the Individuals with Disabilities Act (IDEA) law. To view the IDEA go to the US Department of Education’s IDEA website at http://idea.ed.gov.

Educate personnel in your state agencies for deaf and hard of hearing people, divisions on civil rights, technology assistance programs, and other agencies involved in providing services for citizens with hearing loss.

Form coalitions of key stakeholders – audiologists, speech therapists, auditory-verbal therapists, CART reporters, teachers, parents, young adults who were mainstreamed, state agency and state division on civil rights staff – strategize together and go out and advocate for better acoustics.

It's a lot less costly to incorporate good acoustics in new construction than to fix a poorly performing classroom later.

Educational failure related to poor acoustics costs the US millions of dollars in remedial and correctional programs and in loss of individual earning and other potential. US Access Board data suggest that 1/3 of the children in every classroom are missing 1/3 of the spoken lesson every day because of excessive background noise. These children are being left behind. The most seriously disadvantaged are children for whom English is a second language. If this wasted money were redirected to the design and construction of schools that provide speech intelligibility as good as adults get in conference rooms today, many more children would be successful learners and contributing members of society. This is the message we need to convey to educators and lawmakers.

The key is the level of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), 35 dB background noise + 25 dB needed by children with hearing loss = 60 dB, the unforced level of a woman teacher's voice. This level is being achieved every day in facilities for adults where we deem good communication to be a design determinant (meeting rooms, A/V and teleconferencing facilities, performance spaces, libraries etc).

Adults who question the importance of good acoustics should imagine themselves sitting next to a motel HVAC unit (the same kind used in schools) while trying to understand a speaker with a pronounced foreign accent who is reading text that is unfamiliar to the listener. Without their usual cues of context, even adult listeners will perform poorly on any test of intelligibility (and children have been shown to need  a 10 dB greater SNR than adults). Furthermore, they will find that the need to focus intensively on the listening task exhausts their ability to do other intellectual work.