Assistive Technology - Tools and Applications 10

Hearing Impairment

The Department of Education and Science Visiting Teacher service is the main source of advice in relation to pupils with hearing difficulty.

Pupils with hearing impairment may be able to hear the teacher more clearly through the use of a loop system.

The Department of Education and Science has a dedicated Visiting Teacher service for pupils with hearing impairment, and these should be the first source of advice for mainstream teachers.

It is important to have clearly established the nature and degree of the hearing loss, ranging from minimal to profound, and the implication of this for the pupil in various school locations. The potential role of technology, vis-à-vis other strategies, and the rationale for its use, should be discussed with the Department specialist, the pupil and any other relevant personnel.

In the case of pupils with hearing difficulties, it is important that technology is complementary to other strategies, such as positioning, non-verbal communication and speech clarity.

Loop systems are especially designed to cut out background noise for people with hearing difficulties. The 'loop' is a wire that picks up sound from a microphone and transmits it to an earpiece, or hearing aid, within the loop. The size of the loop will vary. A cinema may have a very large loop, while a pupil in a classroom may wear a neck loop that will pick up the teacher's voice, transmitted from a microphone.

Loops are increasingly being installed in public areas such as cinemas, banks and public telephones, their presence is indicated by the symbol in the sidebar opposite.

The Microsoft Accessibility Options

(START > Settings > Control Panel > Accessibility Options) has SoundSentry and ShowSounds features for people with hearing impairment, and these give visual signals instead of the usual computer bleeps which indicate error messages. SoundSentry is accessed from Sound in the Accessibility Options. Check the Use SoundSentry box and click the Apply button. The Settings box allows you to adjust how the system will respond when an error bleep is given.19 You can then decide what form of visual warning is preferred.

Show Sounds tells some programmes to display captions for the speech and sounds that they make.