Portland Meetings

The Association of Medical Professionals With Hearing Losses (AMPHL) Conference takes place this weekend in Portland, Oregon. For more information, click here.

Getting to Know.. Gestuno

Gestuno is an early version of International Sign often used at meetings involving many internationals. You’ll see it at events like Deaflympics and meetings of the World Federation of the Deaf. It’s a standardised international sign system. The book Gestuno: International Sign Language of the Deaf, published in 1975, has a list of 1500 signs. More grammar was informally added by interpreters and users over time. The choice of the word Gestuno is a reference gesture and oneness (Gest for gesture and uno for one).

Getting to Know... Wendy Cheng

Wendy Cheng founded the Association of Adult Musicians With Hearing Loss. Now living in Gaithersburg, Maryland, Cheng was first diagnosed with hearing loss not long after her family came to the US from Taiwan, when she was nine years old. She eventually received cochlear implants, learned to play classical piano, then the violin and finally the viola. The Association has grown to more than 200 members around the country. Find out more about the organization here.

Hearing Aid Check List

Here's what you should expect when you buy hearing aids. Your dispenser should:

• Sell every style of hearing aid.
  
• Conduct an extensive hearing assessment in a soundproof booth.
  
• A follow-up test should be created while you are wearing the new aid to determine how well it is working in several simulated situations.
  
• The initial fitting should be included in the purchase price along with at least two or three visits.
  
• You should be able to get a copy of your hearing tests.
  
• You should be given a trial period during which you can return your hearing aid at no cost or for a minimal fee.
  
• Your contract specifies that you will get all or most of your money back if you return the hearing aid or aids within the trial period.
  
• This document should also cover the length of the warranty and the cost to replace lost or damaged aids, and specify the policy on batteries.

Musicians with Hearing Loss

Two audiologists have written a book that tells the story of 11 musicians with hearing loss. Making Music with a Hearing Loss: Strategies and Stories is the work of Dr. Marshall Chasin and Dr. Brad Ingrao, but the stars are the members of the Maryland-based Association of Adult Musicians with Hearing Loss who are featured. Charles Mokotoff, now in his 50s, spent years hiding his deafness, even as he performed and taught classical guitar. He lost his hearing abruptly at the age of 15. Doctors were unable to give him a reason for it. It lead him to wear a hearing aid, hidden by his long hair. By 1990, he quite music to work for the Massachusetts Learning Center for Deaf Children. HE began playing at again when he started teaching at Gallaudet University where he learned ASL. There's more info about the book here and more info about Mokotoff here.

Noah showing off his signs

A video from Jessie who says she has four children and is practicing sign with one of her kids in this video. No captioning.

Silence of love

Here's a moving video from a Thailand insurance company about a deaf family.

Marlee on KTLA

Marlee Matlin spoke with the Los Angeles Morning News Show team at KTLA about her role in the show Switched at Birth. Watch the video below. The station doesn't appear to have provided captioning. You can tell them what you think about that here.

Righting a Wrong

Emerson Lee Clay left the Kentucky school for the Deaf more than half a century ago without getting any recognition that he had completed his courses. But this afternoon the Kentucky Board of Education gave diplomas Clay and other blacks who were enrolled at the school, but were not allowed to graduate between 1935 and 1955. John Brown of Louisville, now 76 years old, told a local paper "I really am proud to get my diploma today." Even though he had to use a walker, Brown rose and went to the stage to receive his diploma.

Suit against Tampa Police

Jacob Cowie is suing four Tampa, Florida police officers. The deaf man says they used excessive force against him at a nightclub called Gaspar's Grotto in Ybor City. An internal investigation cleared the officers, so Cowie has filed a civil rights lawsuit claiming the officers, one of whom was undercover, punched and kicked him repeatedly and eventually used a stun gun against him. They did not arrest Cowie, but given a notice to appear in court on a disorderly conduct charge. That charge was eventually dropped. Cowie needed surgery for his injuries.

Whoopi Goldberg's Hearing Loss

Whoopi Goldberg now wears small hearing aids to help her pick up low tones, according to the National Enquirer. The tabloid quotes the Oscar winning actress as saying, "I attribute my own hearing loss - which, by the way, is suffered by thousands of people in varying degrees - to years and years of listening to music so loudly and so close to the delicate ear drum." She attended the Starkey Hearing Foundation's awards presentation last month in Minnesota. Goldberg is now warning young music fans to protect their hearing.

Captioning Lectures

There are four brands of software that most colleges use for captioning lectures: 3Play Media, Echo360, Sonic Foundry's Mediasite, and McGraw-Hill's Tegrity. Besides providing a needed service for deaf students, the value of captioning extends to everyone in the classroom. Students can use the transcription to search for a keyword and jump to any part of a video to find exactly what they need.

Meetings in Carolina

The South Carolina Assoc. of the Deaf holds its annual meetings in Spartanburg starting tomorrow through the 8th. For more information, click here.

Passing Along Terp Costs

Under ADA law, a lawyer (or other business) cannot pass the cost of an interpreter on to the client. If you request an interpreter and he or she would have to pay for those services. The only way around this provision of the law is if the lawyer can prove it would be an undue burden. That is a tough standard to meet because a business cannot simply say the interpreter costs more than I want to spend or the fee exceeds my budget. If it went to court, a judge would take into consideration the balance sheet of the business along with how money is being spent.

Captioning at Penn State

Penn State University's College of Art and Architecture offers students captioned videos of lectures through 3Play Media's online transcription service. A professor simply hits the captioning button and within a couple of days, the professor is sent a file that can be placed into the course content section of the class online interface.

Deafenstein

Last night's episode of Switched At Birth included a reference to a movie called Deafenstein. One of the deaf characters in the TV show gave another one a poster for the made-up movie about a deaf monster. The Frankenstein adaptation is supposedly performed entirely in ASL. The film is so bad (in the cheesy sense) that the Switched at Birth characters like it. It is apparently a takeoff of a real film titled Deafula, a 1975 version of Dracula performed in ASL, with a similar reputation.On another note, the ABC Family series has received an order for 22 more episodes, which will give Switched a 32 episode first season. The next season will begin early next year. So, while the network is is running promotional announcements for the finale next week, take note that it will be the summer finale and not the season finale.

Rochester Roots

Rochester, New York has been associated with deafness since at least 1876. That’s when what is now the Rochester School for the Deaf opened. In the 1800s, people were discouraged from talking in sign language on street corners. That’s when The Rochester Method of sign language developed where each word is fingerspelled. The practice continued until the 1940s. The city is now home to what is probably the nation's largest deaf population per capita. The National Technical Institute for the Deaf was established in 1965 in Rochester. Three years later, the facility accepted its first class of 71 students. Most of NTID’s funding comes from the federal government. Congress gave it more than $55 million last year. That’s about three-fourths of the Institute’s entire budget. It serves some 1200 deaf students.

Captioning at Gally

Most of the classroom lectures at Gallaudet University are not captioned. That's because most of the lectures are delivered in sign language without spoken English. In order to offer captioning, lectures must be interpreted after they are given and then sent off for transcription. However, there are 11 classrooms at the Washington, DC school that are hooked up with the Echo360 caption software. A professor only has to hit a button and a file is sent to the software maker where the lecture is transcribed and sent back to the professor for distribution to the students. The school also has two self-service lecture capture studios on campus where faculty and students create learning objects, video-based projects, and online lectures for distance-learning courses.

Automation in the College Classroom

Virginia's George Mason University hopes to one day make captioning in the classroom completely automated. A caption proposal has been approved at the school that would allow faculty members to upload their audio files to a server. From there, automated voice-recognition software called Docsoft:AV produces a fully captioned transcript of the classroom lecture. Student workers will review what the program produces until the automation is accurate enough to work on its own. It must overcome poor audio quality, the different accents of speakers, and other variables. George Mason has a number of veterans with hearing impairments who are are taking classes and using the CART system in the classroom (CART stands for Communication Access Realtime Translation). This real-time text translation is expensive and requires someone to transcribe lecture from another location.

ADA & Air Travel

Adjoining seats must be provided when a passenger with a hearing impairment is traveling with an interpreter who will be assisting the person or interpreting during the flight, under ADA law. If you are flying with a service animal, you must be allowed to decide whether you sit in a bulkhead seat or not.