Hearing impairments
Hearing impairments range from mild to profound. Some individuals have difficulty hearing when there is background noise or when the tones of the sounds are high or low. More profound losses at an early age result in lack of acquisition of speech because no or few sounds can be processed. There has been much discussion about the effect of repeated exposure to loud noises as a cause of partial deafness and this, indeed, may have an impact on individuals who attend loud concerts or listen to music with earphones at a high volume. The hearing impaired individual may experience difficulties with lecture, cooperative learning activities and participating in group discussions.
Hearing impaired individuals
understand language through a variety of means. The public is increasingly
familiar with signing, because it used more and more frequently to
accompany major public addresses and community presentations. There
are different types of signing, which leads to considerable and, sometimes,
heated conversation within the hearing impaired community as to the
benefits and disadvantages of each system of communication. American
Sign Language is different from English. It uses signs to convey ideas
and does not rely on traditional rules of grammar and syntax. Expressive
language and reading are two very different processes, therefore.
Cued speech uses finger signs placed near the mouth that convey the
phonemes of English. People who "hear" English through cueing also
rely on lip or speech reading and residual hearing to some extent.
Others depend entirely on speech reading. This is considered to be
the least reliable method of taking in information as it is easy to
confuse words. Often, speech readers also rely on other means of understanding
through interpreters. Real time captioning is a simultaneous translation
method that allows the transcriber to type voice (conversations, lectures)
that are displayed on a screen as text. The individual must be able
to read as quickly as the transcriber types.
If you have a hearing impaired
student in your class, you will need to work closely with the Office
of Disabilities Services to determine how to provide instruction to
the student. Often students with hearing impairments who arrive in
college have a broad repetoire of compensatory strategies that they
have learned to use very effectively. They may find the adjustment
to the increase volume of verbal information somewhat intimidating
at first and require additional assistance. You can help by observing
the student carefully and addressing any concerns immediately.
Visual Disabilities
Visual disabilities include disorders in the structure and function of the eye. Vision may be distorted or occluded by a limited peripheral field, glaucoma, retinal detachment or strabismus, for example. Central nervous system blindness occurs with damage to the occipital lobe of the brain. Legal blindness occurs when the vision in the better eye with correction is 20/70 or less. This means that an object that most people could see at 70 feet away would be seen by the visually-impaired individual at 20 feet of distance.
Classrooms are full of visual information. As we move into "smart classrooms" and instructional design that promotes multi-modality learning through the use of overheads, web information put on the screen, and video, students with visual limitations are put at a disadvantage. It is important to provide oral information through lecture, discussion and audio tapes to complement all visual information. This is particularly true for courses that have a large computer component. Many, but not all, visually impaired students have adapted their home computers to fit their needs, but some require an embedded auditory description of visual features. The Universal Web Accessibility Design (http://www.webaim.org) criteria are available to guide the development of accessible web pages and should be used when creating on-line materials so they are available to individuals with sensory impairments.
