Abilities

An auditory impairment limits the ability to hear and varies from impairment (in one or both ears) to deafness (complete hearing loss in both ears). People with an auditory impairment may be able to hear sound, but cannot always understand speech, especially when there is (a lot of) background noise. Hearing aids help people who fall into this category.

Sign language is an important aid for deaf people and provides a critical means of visual communication. Printed media has traditionally provided a way for deaf people to access information and increased online multimedia offer offers many new possibilities for people with an auditory impairment. Unfortunately, not all available media is designed to be accessible. For example, videos need subtitles or transcripts to be accessible to people with a hearing impairment.

Hearing and auditory impairment is a relatively new subject area for UKAAF and we are currently developing guidance for video captioning and speech to text.

Conditions that affect the brain and central nervous system can lead to cognitive and neurological impairment which affect the ability to read, however, such conditions do not correlate with the ability to cognitively process and understand content. Dyslexia is a common cognitive impairment that involves difficulty reading due to problems identifying speech sounds and learning how they relate to letters and words (decoding and affects areas of the brain that process language.

Solutions for cognitive impairment include Easy Read – developed for people with learning disabilities to help them understand important information. Easy Read information is written in short sentences that avoid difficult words or jargon and sentences are supported by images that help to explain the meaning.

UKAAF supports Easy Read and we expect to expand our research into making information accessible for those with cognitive impairments in the future through a new subject area.

A speech impediment or impairment is a type of communication disorder where ‘normal’ speech is disrupted and cannot be recognised. Impairments include stuttering and lisps or can be more profound, while being mute is an inability to speak at all. People with speech impairments often experience problems with voice-based services so alternate services are required.

Sign language (British Sign Language in the UK) is the preferred language of over 145,00 people in the UK. Sign language can be seen on many television broadcasts and news programmes. Other solutions to speech impediment include digital devices that provide the ability to write or chat and turn text into speech (TTS).

UKAAF is currently considering publishing guidance into voice-based services for the speech impaired.

A physical (or motor) impairment means that motor functions are disrupted and movement restricted. This diverse group of limitations includes people with involuntary movements (spasms or tremors), coordination problems, paralysis, arthritis and people with missing limbs.

Modern technology provides many useful solutions to information access that include specialized software and hardware to enable access to information. Whilst UKAAF does not offer direct guidance in this area we continue to monitor standards and solutions in this area on behalf of our members.

Publications

British Sign Language (BSL) is the preferred language of over 87,000 Deaf people in the UK for whom English may be a second or third language. Sign languages are fully functional and expressive languages; at the same time, they differ profoundly from spoken languages. BSL is a visual-gestural language with a distinctive grammar using handshapes, facial expressions, gestures and body language to convey meaning. Source: BDA

Microsoft commissioned independent interviews with British Sign Language (BSL) users in 2021. One lady signed “I was born Deaf. I have never heard English. I am not oral. My education was in sign language. You tell me, in what sense is English my second language?”.

Dr Kate Rowley, from the University of Wolverhampton, said: “Print literacy levels in the deaf population, whether they have been orally or manually educated, have not improved in the last fifty years.

“One study reported that 16-year-old deaf school leavers in the UK had an average reading age of 9 years and recent studies show little improvement in the last forty years.”

(Source https://limpingchicken.com/2020/12/16/deaf-news-uk-government-covid-guidance-requires-year-9-reading-age-report-finds/)

Using assistive technology means website owners can easily create in-vision sign language versions of the text, in addition to captioning videos.