Who are we, and where are we?
Technology has had dramatic effect on the hearing health landscape and it has led to a creation of a huge population that form the ‘invisible majority’ of the deafness spectrum.
It is important to understand the challenges and barriers the invisible majority face on a daily basis and why it is so difficult to create visibility of this population. This poses barriers to being able to enact change on a national scale for the benefit of the everyone on the deafness/hearing loss spectrum in many areas.
This post focuses on why greater awareness and acknowledgment of this invisible population is critical for the improvement of the national hearing health landscape for everyone on the spectrum, regardless of whether they see themselves as being deaf/Deaf/hard of hearing/hearing impaired/having hearing loss.
The term ‘deaf’ is used in this post for brevity and we are aware that others can identify, even interchangeably, with different terms (deafness/hearing loss or deaf/hard of hearing/hearing impaired) except those who identify as Deaf for cultural reasons.
NOTE: This post is not about which communication method is better or worse as both are equally important and valid when it comes to the critical aspect of language development.
- Executive functions are essential for human achievement(Doebel and Muller 2023)
- Auditory deprivation [such as hearing loss and/or learning spoken language via technology such as hearing aids and cochlear implants] affects cognition in downstream ways (Kral et al 2016)
- There a special relationship between executive function and hearing loss (Kronenberger et al 2020)
- There a relationship between deaf learners and social maturity, and EF is implicated (Marschark et al 2017)
Let’s examine what is meant by the ‘invisible majority’.
The cochlear implant technology has been nothing short of groundbreaking and it has dramatically changed the trajectories of many people all over the world who are deaf. However, with change, comes consequences.
There are thousands of Australians who have cochlear implants and the number is increasing each year.
Many cochlear implant users primarily communicate via spoken language. Some use sign language or are capable of using both spoken and sign language.
Why are they termed the ‘invisible majority’ in this post?
Sign language, Auslan in this case, is immediately visible when used. It typically identifies the user as a Deaf person. Spoken language does not do this for its deaf user. If we look at the numbers from a national perspective, the number of deaf people who use spoken language as their primary mode of communication is much higher than those who use Auslan (Australian sign language). We’re talking millions compared to thousands. This is the ‘invisible majority’. With 3.6 million people in Australia having some form of hearing loss or balance disorder, this is projected to reach 7.8 million by 2060, due to many factors such as age-related or noise-induced causes.
What does this mean for accessibility and what situations are we talking about?
The increased visibility of the Auslan language and interpreters in the mainstream media and general public’s awareness was long overdue and continues to be of paramount importance, particularly in emergency announcement situation. The awareness of providing Auslan interpreting continues to grow across the nation, as evidenced by interpreters at cultural, entertainment and sporting events.
But, what about those who use spoken language and are not familiar with Auslan?
- Where is the live/closed captioning at those events?
- Hearing loops don’t work for those who need to lipread.
- Hearing does not automatically equate to comprehension.
- Cochlear implants are not a perfect fix. The speech comprehension of a person who has had age-related/noise-induced hearing loss is going to be very different from someone who was born deaf and was implanted as a child.
- Accessibility and awareness go hand in hand. Interpreters/hearing loops are not the default for all people who are deaf but this is the case in many situations.
- What’s the incentive for those responsible for implementing accessibility?
If we use the example of closed captioning in cinemas to illustrate one of many day-to-day examples of accessibility. This is a real scenario where both spoken language and Auslan users have been advocating for closed captioning in cinemas over the last few decades.
The common refrain from cinema providers is that the general public don’t like seeing the subtitles on the screen or they’ll provide a closed captioned session on a specific day, at a specific time for a specific movie which defeats the purpose of being able to go to the cinema and have choice over what we want to watch and when.
This doesn’t match up with the increasing usage of closed captions by many members of the general public on their personal devices.
What is missing here is the visibility of the scale of cinema-goers who would benefit from closed caption sessions. There’s no knowledge of how many people who are deaf who go to the movies, have stopped going or put up with the suboptimal option of Captiview because there’s no other alternative at the cinema. There’s no knowledge of how many people who have English as their second language or general public customers who would actually prefer having the captions on.
In short, there’s no incentive for cinema providers to do the work to make their venues more accessible because they don’t realise how many people are actually impacted, or in more cynical terms, how much better their bottom line could be if they did do the work.
So, how do we increase the visibility of the ‘invisible majority’?
Greater collaboration between all major organisations in the hearing health landscape to:
- Create a clearer picture of how many deaf people there are across the nation
- Generate greater awareness of the deafness/hearing loss spectrum and how the supports/accessibility can differ
- Dispel public negative misconceptions and misunderstandings of deafness/hearing loss,
- In turn, this helps people who are deaf or have hearing loss become more comfortable with being able to advocate for themselves in the public sphere
