“Being Born Deaf Is No Barrier”– One Mum’s View
Parents can be thrown on learning their baby or child is deaf, but with time, everyone finds what works for their family. As parent Lisa Ridge Valentine says, “If somebody told me how Nansi and Annie...
View ArticlePairing iPhones With Digital Hearing-Devices
For teens wanting to listen to music and chat on the phone with friends, Bluetooth can connect hearing-devices with MP3 players or phones. Two products are Nokia’s Bluetooth Neckloop and HumanTechnik’s...
View Article‘Happy New Ear’ To The HSE From A Parent Group
Last month, the Irish Examiner revealed that over 350 children are awaiting second cochlear implants from Beaumont Hospital’s pediatric service, due to HSE caps on budgets for spending on health and...
View ArticleCalifornia Student Seeks Captions Instead Of FM
In 2009, a California-based high school student with a cochlear implant asked her school district to provide realtime captions in class, instead of a FM system, which she said gave her headaches and...
View ArticleStudy Supports For Doctors With Hearing Issues
An article, “Deafness Among Physicians and Trainees: A National Survey“, in the February 2013 issue of Academic Medicine, gives insights to how doctors with hearing issues access their training and get...
View ArticleCrowd-Computing: New Solutions For Captions
Speech-to-text automation has a huge role in creating classroom captions for students with hearing and other issues, who don’t always note-take in class. To address the multi-speaker shortcomings of...
View ArticleTalking With Teens Who Have Hearing Issues
Deafness is called the ‘invisible disability’, and teens can be very reluctant to disclose what they see as a social vulnerability. A librarian who has hearing issues herself, shares some communication...
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Mindset Change: Altering Perceptions of Ability
On June 28th, IDK’s Caroline Carswell hosted a workshop, “Mindset Change (Essential): Transforming Perceptions of Ability”, at the 2013 conference of the UK’s National Association of Disability...
View ArticleNo Captions For Public Service Broadcasting Event
Public service broadcasters are tasked with serving the population in their country, often with a charter to define their obligations. On July 15th 2013, Ireland’s national broadcaster, RTÉ, held a...
View ArticleNotes From Zambia On Inclusive Education
One year ago, IDK mentioned South Africa’s Eduplex school, a solid model for inclusive education at home and oveseas. Recently, a new critique on inclusive education was published by the development...
View ArticleGoogle Glass: A Device For Life With Subtitles?
With Google Ireland celebrating ten years at its base in Dublin by opening The Foundry, its innovation and conference centre, a look at how its Google Glass technology might impact people with hearing...
View ArticleFeilte 2013: School Acoustics From A Pupil’s View
Earlier this year, Ireland’s Teaching Council invited all registered members to apply in a lottery to attend Feilte, its festival of digital-teaching projects to celebrate World Teachers’ Day in...
View ArticleSmartphone Apps For Bluetooth Hearing Devices
New smartphone-based hearing solutions are marketed to ‘boomers’ or seniors, but the reality is that a tech-savvy youth population with partial hearing similarly wants discreet hearing-solutions for...
View ArticleConsumer Technology For Single Sided Deafness
With Derrick Coleman, the Seattle Seahawks fullback who’s legally deaf, recently storming onto our screens in a Duracell advert, the social impact of the advertising campaign is already being witnessed...
View ArticleVideo Platforms Advise Creators To Self-Caption
Google’s YouTube product manager Brad Ellis, discussed provisions for web-video accessibility at Streaming Media West in November 2013. According to Ellis, the onus is on web-video creators to caption...
View ArticleCommercial Aviation Lures A Pilot With Implants
Canadian-born Jordan Livingston (aged 19) has won a scholarship to train toward becoming a commercial aviation pilot. The significance? He wears two cochlear implants and was born profoundly deaf, to a...
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Journal Article: Parents’ Vital Role In Self-Esteem
IDK’s June 2013 presentation at the annual conference of the UK’s National Association of Disability Practitioners was published in the Conference Edition of the Journal of Inclusive Practice in...
View ArticleGetting Your Online Videos Captioned For Quality
Captioning service providers in the US are seeing more requests from the education, enterprise and government sectors as video captioning is outsourced to meet defined quality standards for...
View ArticleHow Listening And Speaking Lifts Literacy Levels
Children who communicate by listening and talking can have strong literacy levels, thanks to extensive practice during their learning to talk process. Stacey Lim, assistant professor of audiology at...
View ArticleWhen Children Speak – And Read The Same Words
Several fascinating articles on cochlear implants and literacy appeared in the recent world press, some of which are collated here for reading. Early Child Literacy Child literacy improves when a...
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