Hearing loss is a partial or total inability to hear. Hearing loss may be present at birth or acquired at any time afterwards. Hearing loss may occur in one or both ears. In children, hearing problems can affect the ability to acquire spoken language, and in adults it can create difficulties with social interaction and at work. Hearing loss can be temporary or permanent. Hearing loss related to age usually affects both ears and is due to cochlear hair cell loss. In some people, particularly older people, hearing loss can result in loneliness.
A cochlear implant (CI) is a surgically implanted neuroprosthesis that provides a person who has moderate-to-profound sensorineural hearing loss with sound perception. With the help of therapy, cochlear implants may allow for improved speech understanding in both quiet and noisy environments. A CI bypasses acoustic hearing by direct electrical stimulation of the auditory nerve. Through everyday listening and auditory training, cochlear implants allow both children and adults to learn to interpret those signals as speech and sound.
The Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod (WELS), also referred to simply as the Wisconsin Synod, is an American Confessional Lutheran denomination of Christianity. Characterized as theologically conservative, it was founded in 1850 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Wycliffe Bible Translators USA is an interdenominational nonprofit organization with a goal "for people from every language to understand the Bible and be transformed."
Bone conduction is the conduction of sound to the inner ear primarily through the bones of the skull, allowing the hearer to perceive audio content even if the ear canal is blocked. Bone conduction transmission occurs constantly as sound waves vibrate bone, specifically the bones in the skull, although it is hard for the average individual to distinguish sound being conveyed through the bone as opposed to the sound being conveyed through the air via the ear canal. Intentional transmission of sound through bone can be used with individuals with normal hearing — as with bone-conduction headphones — or as a treatment option for certain types of hearing impairment. Bones are generally more effective at transmitting lower-frequency sounds compared to higher-frequency sounds.
Service and supports for people with disabilities are those government or other institutional services and supports specifically provided to enable people who have disabilities to participate in society and community life. Some such services and supports are mandated or required by law, some are assisted by technologies that have made it easier to provide the service or support while others are commercially available not only to persons with disabilities, but to everyone who might make use of them.
Unilateral hearing loss (UHL) is a type of hearing impairment where there is normal hearing in one ear and impaired hearing in the other ear.
Global Recordings Network (GRN) was founded by Joy Ridderhof in Los Angeles, California in 1939 as "Gospel Recordings." The mission of GRN is "In partnership with the church, to effectively communicate the Good News of Jesus Christ by means of culturally appropriate audio and audio-visual materials in every language." This is accomplished by recording the stories of the Bible in the native language or dialect, by a mother tongue speaker and providing them in an audio format to churches, mission organisations and the community at large. Often the languages do not have a written form. GRN has recorded over 6,000 languages or dialects. GRN has offices in more than 20 countries. GRN's motto is "Telling the story of Jesus in EVERY language."
Paris Reidhead was a Christian missionary, teacher, writer, and advocate of economic development in impoverished nations.
Deaf education is the education of students with any degree of hearing loss or deafness. This may involve, but does not always, individually-planned, systematically-monitored teaching methods, adaptive materials, accessible settings, and other interventions designed to help students achieve a higher level of self-sufficiency and success in the school and community than they would achieve with a typical classroom education. There are different language modalities used in educational setting where students get varied communication methods. A number of countries focus on training teachers to teach deaf students with a variety of approaches and have organizations to aid deaf students.
Deafness has varying definitions in cultural and medical contexts. In medical contexts, the meaning of deafness is hearing loss that precludes a person from understanding spoken language, an audiological condition. In this context it is written with a lower case d. It later came to be used in a cultural context to refer to those who primarily communicate through sign language regardless of hearing ability, often capitalized as Deaf and referred to as "big D Deaf" in speech and sign. The two definitions overlap but are not identical, as hearing loss includes cases that are not severe enough to impact spoken language comprehension, while cultural Deafness includes hearing people who use sign language, such as children of deaf adults.
Christian Mission for the Deaf (CMD) is a non-profit Christian organization whose goal is the bring communication, literacy, and spirituality to deaf Africans.
The Forum of Bible Agencies International is an alliance of more than 25 international Bible Agencies and other missions organizations which provides access to the Bible and encourages its use worldwide.
World Hearing Day is a campaign held each year by Office of Prevention of Blindness and Deafness of the World Health Organization (WHO). Activities take place across the globe and an event is hosted at the World Health Organization on March 3. The campaign's objectives are to share information and promote actions towards the prevention of hearing loss and improved hearing care. Any individual or organization can participate in various ways, by sharing campaign materials and organizing outreach actions. Examples are provided in the World Hearing Day annual activities reports. For participation to be recognized, one needs to register and report on their activity.
The machine translation of sign languages has been possible, albeit in a limited fashion, since 1977. When a research project successfully matched English letters from a keyboard to ASL manual alphabet letters which were simulated on a robotic hand. These technologies translate signed languages into written or spoken language, and written or spoken language to sign language, without the use of a human interpreter. Sign languages possess different phonological features than spoken languages, which has created obstacles for developers. Developers use computer vision and machine learning to recognize specific phonological parameters and epentheses unique to sign languages, and speech recognition and natural language processing allow interactive communication between hearing and deaf people.
Live Transcribe is a smartphone application to get realtime captions developed by Google for the Android operating system. Development on the application began in partnership with Gallaudet University. It was publicly released as a free beta for Android 5.0+ on the Google Play Store on February 4, 2019. As of early 2023 it had been downloaded over 500 million times. The app can be installed from an .apk file by sideloading and it will launch, but the actual transcription functionality is disabled, requiring creation of an account with Google.
Japanese Sign Language (JSL), also known as Nihon Shuwa, is the unofficial but most predominantly used sign language used by nearly 57,000 native signers as their primary language. It is a convergent, Deaf community sign language developed in the late 19th century.
Estimates of the deaf population in Tunisia range from 40,000 to 60,000 people. These estimates indicate that deaf people make up between 0.3% to 0.5% of the population. The percent of deaf Tunisians can be much higher in isolated communities, ranging from 2% to 8%. The increase in prevalence is attributed to higher rates of intermarriage, geographic isolation, and social traditions. Tunisian Sign Language, abbreviated as TSL or LST, is the most commonly used sign language in Tunisia. As of 2008, TSL's user population is 21,000 signers.
According to The Deaf Unit Cairo, there are approximately 1.2 million deaf and hard of hearing individuals in Egypt aged five and older. Deafness can be detected in certain cases at birth or throughout childhood in terms of communication delays and detecting language deprivation. The primary language used amongst the deaf population in Egypt is Egyptian Sign Language (ESL) and is widely used throughout the community in many environments such as schools, deaf organizations, etc. This article focuses on the many different aspects of Egyptian life and the impacts it has on the deaf community.
