IV. Whom For?
4.1. Disabled and Disability
4.1.2. Auditory Impairment
Auditory impairment is an invisible disability, the most known is deafness which prevent to affected person to hear; but there are different stages in between normal hearing and deafness. Hard of hearing people or people affected by a tinnitus can encounter the same difficulties as deaf people. The Royal National Institute for Deaf People (RNID) estimates that there are 8,945,000 deaf and hard of hearing adult people in the United Kingdom and that 2.3 million adults suffer of tinnitus that makes it difficult for them to sleep (among those, 230,000 have difficulties to lead a normal life because of the tinnitus) (RNID, undated).
If the Internet is a wonderful tool for people who have a hearing impairment and that can encounter difficulties to communicate with normal hearing people, it is far from perfect. To understand the problem hearing impaired, in particularly deaf, people encounter on the Internet it is important to first understand that communication for them can be different.
Samuel le Morvan, normally hearing and the son of two deaf parents, wrote a series of articles about the subject of deaf people and the Internet. His second article focused on the languages used by deaf people to communicate: sign language. Many people have belief about Sign language: that this language is international or that every deaf people can “speak” it. This is not true. In the same way, it is not true that all deaf people can read English language; moreover, for those who were born deaf, English is a foreign language. In France, 80% of deaf people are illiterate (Le Morvan, 2008). This is due to the difference of construction of sentence in a language and a sign language, for example: the English sentence “What is your name?” would be translated in British Sign Language as “Name What You?” (BritishSignLanguage.com, 2008). Samuel le Morvan explains that there is a division among deaf people: there are those who are literate, those who can speak Sign language, those who are both, and those who are neither (Le Morvan, 2008).
On the Internet, an obvious inaccessible content is video, indeed, if deaf people can see the images they cannot hear the sound from them. There are two alternative to give them access to the information they can reach. The first one is a textual alternative, in the form of subtitles or of a transcript. The second one is to offer a translation in Sign language. Those two solutions are very time consuming and can be difficult to implement (captioning a video needs good film editing skills), and are not self sufficient. Indeed, as said above, all deaf people are not able to read English and all deaf people are not able to understand sign language; the best practice would be to offer both solutions.