deaf

LAS VEGAS--My stepfather doesn't have the best hearing, and phone calls can be a trial. He tends to crank the speakerphone volume to MAX.

Clarity, a division of Plantronics, is trying to help the tens of millions of people with hearing loss with its new Ensemble phone, which displays real-time captions of what the other person on the line is saying.

Developed with ClearCaptions, the Ensemble is an amplified phone with a 7-inch touch-screen tablet display for the captions.

While there are other caption phones on the market, the Ensemble is being billed as the first of its kind with a tablet interface, and is on display at CES 2013. … Read more

Netflix and the National Association for the Deaf (NAD) have come to an agreement about captions for the company's streaming videos: 100 percent must be captioned by 2014.

The agreement comes by way of a class action lawsuit filed by NAD in 2010 that alleged the streaming service was "failing to provide adequate closed captioning on 'Watch Instantly' streaming video programming," and therefore was in violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act.

After back-and-forth between the lawyers -- and Netflix working to get the case thrown out -- the two sides finally settled this week.

"We … Read more

You might think you can't have a phone conversation with someone who's deaf, but Dimitri Kanevsky would not only disagree, he'd prove you wrong.

Deaf since he was 3, Kanevsky has hardly let his disability get in the way of progress -- or success. Born in the Soviet Union, he eventually emigrated, first to Israel, and then to the United States, and went on to become a research staff member in the speech and language algorithms department at IBM's Thomas Watson Research Center.

On Monday, Kanevsky and 13 others were honored at the White House in … Read more

Cochlear implants, which help 220,000 deaf people around the world hear, come with a few unfortunate side effects.

Because the implants also consist of external parts (the mic, a speech processor, and a radio transmitter coil) worn rather conspicuously behind the ear, users are often unable to swim or wear helmets comfortably, must fully rely on a microphone exposed to the elements, and have to deal with appearing at least somewhat handicapped.

So an electrical engineer at the University of Utah has developed a prototype that moves all these external parts into the middle ear, allowing cochlear implants to … Read more

"The laughter felt loud," said Sarah Churman.

It's impossible for anyone who isn't deaf to even imagine how it might feel to hear laughter for the first time. Or, indeed, your own voice.

Yet Churman's husband decided to film the moment. He then posted it to YouTube.

In the notes to the video, Churman explained that hearing aids only help so much. Eight weeks ago, however, she was given an Esteem implant, made by Envoy Medical.

The device itself is placed behind the ear and no part of it is visible. It doesn't have … Read more

Netflix has been sued by the National Association of the Deaf for failing to offer closed-captioning on enough of its streaming content.

In a lawsuit (PDF) filed Thursday in U.S. District Court for the district of Massachusetts, the NAD alleges that Netflix is in violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act by not providing captions for most of its "Watch Instantly" streamed movies and TV shows.

Pointing to the approximately 36 million Americans who are deaf or hard of hearing, the National Association of the Deaf says that it and members of the deaf community have already … Read more

A new national study has found that one in five adolescents now suffers some sort of hearing impairment, according to a report Tuesday on NPR's All Things Considered program. That's a scary statistic.

In the August 18 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, researchers from the Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston analyzed federal data collected from national yearly surveys of the health of American citizens. The conclusion is chilling: "The prevalence of hearing loss among a sample of U.S. adolescents aged 12 to 19 years was greater in 2005-2006 compared with … Read more

We all know what it's like to send a text message or e-mail whose tone is completely misinterpreted. A series of additional messages to better explain ourselves ensues and the efficiency of the original message is long gone.

That's one reason engineers at the University of Washington are testing a tool called MobileASL that uses motion detection to identify American Sign Language and transmit images over U.S. cell networks. Sometimes, words alone just don't cut it.

"Sometimes with texting, people will be confused about what it really means," says Tong Song, a Chinese national who is studying at Gallaudet University, a school for the deaf in Washington, D.C., and participating in UW's summer pilot test. "With the MobileASL, phone people can see each other eye to eye, face to face, and really have better understanding."

Eve Riskin, a UW professor of electrical engineering, says the MobileASL team's study of 11 students is the first to examine how deaf and hearing-impaired people in the U.S. use mobile video phones. The researchers plan to launch a larger field study this winter.

The engineers are now working to optimize compressed video signals for sign language, increasing the quality of the images around the face and hands to reduce the data rate to 30 kilobytes per second. To minimize the amount of battery power, the phones employ motion sensors to determine whether sign language is being used.… Read more

The trajectory of the "Danny the Dragon Meets Jimmy" story was fairly standard, as far as modern stories go. First, it was an illustrated book. Then a DVD. Then iStoryTime developed it as an iPhone app.

But it went a step further. As of last week, the award-winning children's book by Tina Turbin and illustrated by Aija Jasuna is the first to be available as an iPad app with a sign language mode.

"We are extremely proud to release the first-ever children's book app for the deaf community," says iStoryTime co-founder Woody Sears. "… Read more