1996 SHHH National Convention

The 1996 SHHH national convention was held in the Hyatt Orlando from June 21-June 24, 1996. The opening session was held at 4:00 pm on June 21 with Michelle Farhquar from the Federal Communications Commission giving the keynote address. Unfortunately, I didn't get to the hotel until 6:00 pm that day and I missed the speech. However, I heard later from other attendees that she talked about how the FCC was going to disseminate guidelines very shortly about the need to design digital wireless phones so they will be hearing aid compatible and not cause interference in hearing aids. (The problems that hearing aid users have with wireless phones is a big topic for SHHH these days.) Anyway, Sprint had a pasta and fajita reception after the opening session and I was able to partake of that and enjoy the good food.

I'm on an Internet mailing list called Beyond-Hearing. I ran into some other members on the B-H list after I had the pasta and met my "Internet" friend, Ruth. (Ruth happens to be a cochlear implant user who plays violin, among other things.) Ruth introduced me to her roommate, Margo, another cochlear implant user who signed quite fluently and we had a good time talking in their room. For most of Friday night though, I was unpacking and orienting myself to the hotel. This hotel groups rooms in "clusters" and clusters of rooms were spread out the hotel grounds with the convention center in the midst of it all. I did have to walk to the hotel front desk and made a request for a vibrating alarm clock and visual door alarm and a fire alarm. I got the vibrating clock but nothing else. They didn't even have captioned decoders on their TVs....rats! (I suspect what happened was that they had many people requesting these things and I was one of the last ones to arrive that evening.) They did have a special system for hearing aid users to use their telephone switch to listen to the clerks at both the hotel front desk and registration booth talk through a microphone but since I'm now deaf, I wasn't getting much help with that device even with my hearing aid on (Once in a while I could hear a low murmur but most of the time, I wasn't getting anything.)

Saturday, June 22, I woke up bright and early. I decided to go for an all you can eat breakfast buffet in the SummerHouse restaurant, located near the hotel lobby. The croissants and baked goods were great, the biscuits were too crumbly and the cantaloupe wasn't sweet enough. While eating, I came up with a personalized schedule for my activities during this convention. The workshops that I chose to attend really reflects my interests as a deafened consumer.

So after breakfast, I was off to my first workshop. What follows are notes I took on each workshop and my impressions of the workshop as well.

Workshop Title: Cochlear Implant Update 1996

Speaker: Dr. Noel Cohen from NYU/Bellevue Medical Center

Since I am thinking about undergoing cochlear implant surgery at Johns Hopkins, I was very interested in what Dr. Cohen would have to say about CIs.

Because of unexpected problems with the real-time and infrared wireless systems, this workshop got a late start. I got anxious when I noticed the real time captioner was having problems with the captioning....I thought if this wasn't fixed, I'd have to beg for a sign language interpreter at the registration desk and I had not seen any around. Fortunately, it didn't get to that point---whew! As a matter of fact, several of the workshops I attended would have technical problems with both the listening system and the real-time captioning software, but they were mostly resolved quickly.

Dr. Mark Ross introduced Dr. Cohen to the audience. [I knew Mark Ross had a severe hearing loss since early childhood at least, yet he had gotten a degree in audiology and does a great deal of research in aural rehabiliation. But, I discovered that although he had worked at the Lexington Center, he didn't sign at all! Too bad he couldn't be more open minded about learning sign language. But one should consider though that Lexington has traditionally been an oral school for the longest time anyway.]

Dr. Cohen started by inviting us to join him next May in New York City, where the Fifth International Cochlear Implant Conference will be held. He then covered a great deal about cochlear implant in his speech...I'm still trying to absorb it all, especially the information regarding complications of the surgery. He started off by explain how an implant works, and then mentioned briefly the two implants (Clarion and Nucleus) currently approved for use. He discussed the criteria for cochlear implant candidacy for both children and adults. He then talked about when a CI is not feasible for a person. I had known that persons with acoustic neuromas or non-functioning VIII auditory nerves didn't qualify, but Dr. Cohen then added more to my list: agenesis (no full development) of the cochlea, ventilation tubes in the auditory nerve, and lastly he added "unwilling adolescents". He mentioned deaf teenagers whose parents want them to become hearing; they were literally dragging their kids into the clinic saying, "Johnny wants an implant". He then showed us CAT scan pictures of a normal and abnormal cochlea.

He said the surgical technique used on each patient was dependent on a number of factors: flap design (I think flap refers to the incision made by surgeon during surgery), facial recess, facial nerve, electrode simulation, and device fixation (whatever that means). He then (very gently) talked about the incision made and discussed briefly the training that surgeons have to learn how to a CI correctly. Most surgeons learn to do the implants on an adult before learning to do it on children. He talked about the etiology of surgical complications, e. g., why surgical complications happen. Surgical complications are dependent on the skill and the experience of the surgeon, the anatomy and pathology of the patient and then he said something about the inherent nature and the complexity of the procedure, which I really didn't understand. (How is the inherent nature of the CI procedure defined?)

He discussed the possible complications of the surgery and then put very small percentage figures (1% or less occurrence) next to each complication. I'm going to have to ask Dr. Niparko and the people at Hopkins more about this because I don't think I understood it all. Complications include: problems with the flap, post-surgical infection in the inner ear, CI electrodes not working, facial nerve paralysis (normally happens when the surgeon is doing his first surgery), extrusion (I'm not sure what that means) and device failure (mostly external due to radiation therapy or the external stress put on the implant by the lifestyle of active kids.)

He then discussed the benefit of cochlear implants. For all recipients, the CI can enhance speechreading. About 60-70% get some open set sentence recognition, meaning they can understand speech without viewing the lips of the speaker. About 25-30% can understand the telephone. Factors involved in speech understanding of CI recepient are: the number of the channels on the device, the speech encoding strategy used by the speech processor, and the rehabilitation environment of the individual (does this individual have an environment to practice listening to speech)?

He discussed the future of cochlear implants. With regard to pediatric cochlear implantation, the current age is 2-3 years; it is possible that soon, the age would be moved to one and half years because an earlier implant means a short period of auditory deprivation, which will lessen the chances of the baby's auditory brain cells from possible deterioration. Of interest to me was the fact they are also investigating the idea of implanting very severely hard of hearing persons who are not doing well with hearing aids. The cochlear implant will get smaller and pretty soon the speech processor will be just behind the ear. And they are looking about making the processor more compatible to magnetic imaging; currently if you have a cochlear implant, you can't have any kind of radiation exposure such as radiation therapy or MRIs.

Finally, Dr. Cohen discussed the ethical concerns of the cochlear implant. He feels strongly that a TEAM of people (audiologist, psychologist, social workers, etc.) should be involved in the entire process, not just the doctor. ENT specialists should be really serious about wanting to do cochlear implant and not just do them to be the first one in town to have done the surgical procedure. Cochlear implant manufacturers must tell us, both doctors and consumers, about the problems with their product without exaggeration or minimizing the problems. I was quite surprised that Dr. Cohen then discussed the controversy the Deaf community has with pediatric cochlear implants---he didn't just gloss over them. He spent about 5 to 10 minutes listing the statements that Deaf activists are saying about the implant and refuting them. He theorized that the cochlear implant poses a serious threat to Deaf culture, since ninety percent of deaf children are born to hearing parents. His views were that 1) two year old children are two young to decide for themselves and parents have a responsibility to make decisions for young children and 2) the "window of opportunity" for speech acquisition is between the ages of 2-4. Unfortunately, I think he neglected to mention that the "window of opportunity" also holds true when it comes to ASL acquisition.

Conclusion: All in all, I learned a great deal from this workshop!

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Workshop: Advocating for Communications Access

Speaker: Sharon Brinks, Esq.

I took this workshop because I thought it would be useful to know how to advocate for the accommodations I want as a deafened individual.

Sharon Brinks is a Michigan attorney who works as a counsel to corporations in Grand Rapids. She is also hard of hearing, a SHHH member, and was one of the founders of the Legal Network of Attorneys for Hard of Hearing and Deaf People. She strikes me as being a no-nonsense woman who is direct and can be forceful to get what she wants.

Ms. Brinks started by telling us that her goals in presenting this seminar was "to get myself unemployed". That was really an attention getting statement! As a corporate counsel, many companies call her if they are worried of being sued for possible noncompliance of the ADA. She told us that she sometimes gets discouraged when she bills a company her normal fee of $125 an hour when some of these cases could have been resolved for far less the cost [of her retainer] without reaching the stage of litigation.

She stressed the importance of documenting EVERYTHING you do if you have problems getting access. One way of doing this is to use the TTY printer. When you, as a hearing-impaired advocate, tell the other party "this conversation is being recorded" and documented on the TTY, that is bound to scare them to listen to you. It is true that in many places TTYs are underused so you may have to call several times before they finally remember how to operate the TTY.

Then she talked about her model of problem solving. (It's all common sense when you think about it, but this was the first time I had seen it put together so nicely.) The first thing to do is decide what your target goal is. You should specify both acceptable and unacceptable result so you can conclude later whether you "won" or "lost". The next step is knowing your rights. Become familiar with the law both at federal and state levels and know where to find available legal and technical support. It is important to know the law on both levels because in some cases, the interpretation of the law is more strict at the state than on the federal level. Next find out who the "power person" is. In other words, find out what has the power to give you what you want. It may be the clerk's supervisor or manager. Lastly, formulate two plans: a plan of action and preparing your support network. And also plan for failure--- if you don't get it at first, document, document, document. Set an realistic time table of sixty to ninety days to get your goals implemented.

Finally Ms. Brinks passed out a sample letter which she said we as SHHH members could all use. I thought the sample letter was very good. It discusses the problem, a paragraph on what the law says, and most importantly, proposed a solution. Most people tend to point out problems but not propose a solution.

This was a very practical workshop and I learned a lot.

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For lunch, I attended a luncheon sponsored by Oticon with other members of Beyond-Hearing. (Oticon, as you may know, manufacturers hearing aids.) I almost didn't go to the luncheon; however, Brad Ingrao, the audiologist working on Oticon's advisory panel, said he could interpret the presentation [about Oticon's Digifocus hearing aid] for me. And interpret he did! I have never seen an audiologist who could sign so fluently and even included some ASL expressions at the right times. Most of this presentation was not relevant to me but at least I could follow along.

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Workshop: Cochlear Implant Panel

Speakers: Dr. John Niparko of Johns Hopkins Medical Center with SHHH cochlear implant receipients

I had been to a cochlear implant panel once, but thought it would be interesting to see how this one differs from the one I attended at the NOVA One SHHH chapter meeting in May.

Dr. Niparko moderated this session and guided the questions for the two CI users, Carol Sliney and Tom Walsh. Both of them decided to go for the CI after seeing how total deafness was negatively impacting them in their work and personal lives. They really wanted to have the implant back in 1989 but had to wait for the U. S. FDA to relax the audiological profiles for CI candidacy (30% or less instead of the original 20% open set speech discrimination in a sound field level). They talked about their surgery and Dr. Niparko augmented what they said regarding the procedure. For example I asked the doctor why it is necessary for the candidate to be given balance tests during evaluation for candidacy. Dr. Niparko then asked the audience present if anyone was having balance problems after they got the implant. And one person did, so that's another thing to think about.

This was an interesting give and take session where the audience heard first hand about the experiences of getting a cochlear implant. Having an experienced cochlear implant surgeon such as Dr. Niparko was a real plus because he could answer questions or augment the panelists statement with his medical perspective.

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Workshop: Telecommunications Relay Panel

Speakers: A Panel of representatives from three major relay services--Sprint, MCI, AT & T

Since I became deaf, I use the relay services almost on a daily basis now. I thought it would be nice to educate myself more on what is happening with relay services and maybe ask a few questions of my own to the panelists.

This workshop was logistically difficult to do. Two of the panelists (Sue Decker and Charles Estes) were deaf and needed a sign language interpreter to voice for them. Plus there were deaf people (representatives from the relay services) in the audience as well. So there were two sign language interpreters, one facing the panel and the other facing the audience. (The former would reverse interpret while the latter would interpret spoken speech to sign.) The interpreter facing the audience had to make sure he wasn't blocking the real-time captioning on the screen. It would have been nice to have the lights dimmed a little so I could read the captions with with ease. But then the signers wouldn't be able to see each other's signing. I did develop a case of temporary whiplash (smile) going back and forth between viewing the captions and reading off the signs. I used the captioning to clarify when I wasn't sure what the signers said. I am puzzled though why the expressive interpreter was necessary. You'd think having computer assisted real-time notetaking would have sufficed for anyone in the audience. I would think that the deaf representatives knew how to read English...unless they are sitting too far away to see the captions well but can see the interpreter better.

Jim Payne of Sprint's TRS did a little speech about what Sprint is doing. He was concerned about the need to have high quality training for their operators and discussed a few things in the work that Sprint is looking at. I came away with the impression that Sprint must have the largest number of relay services in the country, and they were concerned that with open competition, that quality would be compromised. (I lost him a little at this point; I'm not sure how the quality of relay services or training of relay operators would change if consumers could choose which TRS they want to use for state relay services.) Charles Estes of MCI is very enthusiastic about open competition and the consumer's right to choose. (I believe though, that MCI has the fewest number of relay services so anything that will help them gain in the relay business is good.) Sue Decker of AT and T didn't prepare a speech but was ready to answer questions from the floor.

There were many questions asked that are of interest to late deafened adults. (I'm beginning to think that when it comes to relay services, deafened and hard of hearing people probably want the same thing.) For example, someone wants to know if a "master" list of functional equivalency has been ever been developed (answer: no). Another one dealt with VCO to VCO. (I had to think a while to understand this one, then realized it could be one VCO caller calling another hard of hearing or deafened person who prefer VCO as well.) Currently most relay services don't have this option. It seems that VCO-to-VCO are showing up in some states' RFPs (request for proposals). Then someone wanted to know why Turbo Code couldn't be used by relay services to speed up typing of text during relay calls. It seems that Ultratec (the developer of Turbo Code) would charge relay service a fee for using their technology.. Another person wanted to know if anything was being done about integrating CART (computer assisted real time notetaking) techniques to speed up typing of text. Sue Decker said AT and T was looking at that and two states already have a requirement for CART technologies to be built into the RFP. There was a question about how to do conference calls on relay and one member of the audience was able to respond to this question instead of the panelists. [And I found out that Maryland's RFP for relay service is up for renewal now and will be signed off hopefully in November].

I enjoyed this panel and certainly learned a lot from it. Now I need to find out exactly what "functional equivalency" really means.......

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I had dinner at the Italian restaurant in the hotel; the seafood marinara which I had was quite good. In the evening, I went to the ice cream reception in the exhibit hall and browsed around the various exhibits. I was hoping to buy a VCO phone and a Silent Call paging system. I thought about gettng the paging system because I am still puzzled as to how to wire up my house with either a visual or tactile alarms. [I won't feel safe until I find a good visual fire alarm, especially when Paul is away on a business trip.] However the Silent Call system was not cheap and I wasn't planning to spend more than $250. And I couldn't find a VCO phone that I really like. The display screen did not really satisfy me. I normaly prefer green text on a black background instead of the LCD display that most VCO phones have nowadays. The other problem I had with these LCD displays is that the display do not have antireflective glare coatings and often catches the light reflection. And I had to decide if I like the smaller-sized keys. Sunday morning, I decided that I liked AT and T's 8840 VCO phone, but they weren't selling it there so I will have to call AT and T when I get home to find out how to buy it. I did feel a little upset though, that SHHH did not have sign language interpreters available for anyone to talk with the exhibitors. (I had requested one on my conference registration form.) I really wanted to talk with the representatives of Cochlear Corporation but since an interpreter was not available, the conversation I had with them was somewhat one-sided.

I was quite tired when I got back to my room from the exhibit hall so I went bed rather early.

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Sunday June 23. SHHH had scheduled an all-day Research Symposium which was basically a series of lectures by professionals in speech and hearing sciences. The purpose of these lectures is to allow interested SHHH members the opportunity learn more about hearing science and psychoacoustics. The first lecture was about how the cochlear processes sound waves so I decided I would attend only this lecture. (The remaining lectures discusses various problems with hearing aids such as designing to solve the problems of recruitment and getting hearing aids to discriminate sound in noise.)

Dr. Charles Liberman's lecture, "Analog Processing in Sensorineural Hearing Loss" was quite good. He started out by showing us the cross section of the cochlea. I didn't know until now that the cochlea actually has three pathways. The middle pathway is the one where all the hair cells reside. The base of the cochlea handles the low frequency sound waves while the apex of the cochlea handles the higher frequencies. The outer hair cells within the cochlea is the one that senses the waves (in the normal ear) and amplifies the incoming waves. The inner hair cells transduces the the amplified sound waves in electrical activity and sends it on to the auditory nerve. In a mild to moderate hearing loss, only the outer hair cells are affected. i. e. less sensitive. So amplification of sound with a hearing aid can help the outer hair cells sense the sound waves. With a profound hearing loss the inner hair cells are affected as well and cannot transduce the sound waves into electrical activity. This would explain why hearing aids are of no help to people with profound hearing losses.

I liked this lecture so much, I asked Dr. Liberman during the question and answer period to have a copy of his slides and he graciously agreed to mail them to me. [In hindsight, I wonder if I have put him on the spot by making that request in the front of all the attendees.] I do wonder now though, exactly how well cochlear implants duplicate the hair cell transduction that is so critical to hearing sound. I'm trying not to think of myself as a person with two defective cochleas, else I get depressed rather easily.

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After that lecture, I had lunch at a wonderful Chinese restaurant called Ming Court. Their dim sum menu was quite good, except for the radish cake. I spent most of the afternoon at the Splendid China tourist attraction and in the evening, spent some time typing up this report.

Monday, June 24

Workshop: Partnership for Success

Speakers: Raymond Trybus, Jordon Goulder, Sam Trychin, Carren Stika, Janet Albright

Again, there was a 30 minute delay as the convention's technical staff tried to get all the various infrared listening systems to work. (About eight companies offered their listening systems to the conference.) The CART software used in this session was really interesting but I didn't like it. Instead of displaying words as they are being typed, the text didn't show up until the text had filled one line. Consequently, I had to deal with a significant time lag before I got what each speaker said. I was also treated to the new experience of having a hearing dog (a poodle) lick me on the elbow before the workshop began..

The speakers are the entire staff of the Rehabilitation and Research Training Center of the Late Deafened and Hard of Hearing (RRTC). This center was made possible by a grant from the National Institute of Disability; both ALDA and SHHH are subcontractors to the center. Dr. Raymond Trybus introduced himself and then discussed a little of the Center's goals which is namely to conduct research on mental health issues related to the hard of hearing and late deafened people. In addition they hope to hold educational workshops to both consumers and rehabilitation professionals in the field to increase awareness of how becoming hard of hearing or become deaf as an adult affects a person's mental health and familial relationships.

Then Dr. Carren Stika talked about the two projects she is doing; one is a survey on the utilization of mental health services by hard of hearing and late deafened people. The other thing she is doing is setting up focus groups for spouses and families of hearing-impaired individuals to assess the impact of hearing impairment on the familial relationships. The survey on utilization of mental health services has already produced some preliminary data so far as hard of hearing people are concerned: most respondents had said they had not thought of seeking services for mental health problems (neurosis, stress, depression, etc.) related to hearing loss. (As for late deafened individuals, I was left with the impression she would pull the premlinary findings later and then compare the two groups.) The focus group study so far has yielded some interesting findings so far as hard of hearing people were concerned: adjustment to hearing loss appear to have more to do with personality style than degree of loss; psychosocial effects of hearing loss appear to be dependent upon age of onset with childhood onset appearing to have a more pervasive effect; hard of hearing individuals and their families frequently do not discuss hearing loss and how it affects familial relationships; and hard of hearing adults whose hearing loss occurred early in life report family members and school officials having minimized, misunderstood, or ignored their loss. Lastly she said that even when reasonable accommodation are available in the workplace, hard of hearing people still have nagging doubts about their competency in the workplace--- they are not performing at the level they want. (I can really relate to some of her statements.)

Jordan Goulder spent some time talking about his survey of deafened adults which took place during last year's ALDA conference. Apparently this survey was to collect data on psychological adjustment to becoming a deafened individual.

Sam Trychin and Janet Albright did not talk very much since Drs. Stika and Goulder's presentation ran over the allotted times. I did find out though that Dr. Trychin thinks that the major problem of hearing loss is an essential breakdown in communication between the hard of hearing person or late deafened person. (Nothing new here for me.)

And Ms. Albright is an audiologist by training; her specialty is use of assistive listening devices. She left me wondering how an audiologist had become a staff member of this Center.

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Workshop: Real-time Captioning

Speaker: Scott Smith substituting for Deanna Baker

I wanted to find out more about how real time captioning works since it is proving to be so valuable for me at SHHH and even ALDA meetings.

Deanna Baker is a real time captioner from Tucson, Arizona, who has gotten herself involved heavily into providing captioning services for hard of hearing groups. She and Scott Smith has been coordinating the real time captioning at SHHH conferences for the last four years. (About 11 reporters from central Florida donated their services to the SHHH conference.) Unfortunately, she could not do her presentation (my suspicion is that one of the reporters couldn't make it to a seminar at the last minute) so Scott Smith had to substitute for her. He tried to follow Ms. Baker's outline for the presentation and allowed time for a question and answer period. He defined real-time reporting as instant output of the spoken word versus captioning, where the real-time words gets displayed on a video screen.

If you have a real-time reporter present, you don't need to record minutes of the meeting; the transcript itself can serve as the minutes. For example, the disks containing the transcript of each seminar at this convention will be sent to SHHH National. [I guess SHHH National will then edit the transcript and publish the conference proceedings but I'm not positive.]

The art of transcribing word for word is a highly demanding skill. In addition, most captioners in the profession are perfectionists---they hate making mistakes. One way to make things easier for the reporter is to provide an agenda and a technical word list. Mr. Smith then commented that both he and Ms. Baker was up all Saturday night putting technical words into the captioning software's dictionary for Sunday's Science symposium before they felt completely ready to caption the symposium.

Where to find caption reporters? One way is to look in the phone books to locate a training school. You can also contact the National Court Reporter's Association or the state court reporter's association. The online service Compuserve has a court reporter's forum as well. I'm pretty sure there has to be a listserv on the Internet for captioners or court reporters, so I will look into this soon.

There are several levels of certification for court reporters. There is no certification in captioning but there is certification for real-time. CCR is the designation for Certified Real-Time Reporter. CSR is the designation for Certified Shorthand Reporter.

Before you try to find a captioner for your meeting, you need to know what equipment will be need and who will provide them: overhead projector, PC viewer, captioning equipment - do you need a video projector too? To caption videotapes, you need both captioning and encoding equipment.

And when you do find a captioner, you need to make sure the room is ready for them. A real-time reporter needs a comfortable chair, a power strip, if there will be background noise (as in the case of Sunday's science symposium) give them an assistive listening device. The captioner needs to be positioned up front so then can watch the speaker and lips. This is especially true where there are background noise in the room. The lighting has to be good so everyone can read the captions. It is best to inspect the setup before the actual day.

The cost of getting a real-time reporter varies. One way you may be able to cut down the cost is to use student reporters who are about to graduate. Most court reporting schools require 6 intern hours before a student can graduate. If the meeting is going to be an all-day session, it might help to get a backup reporter, since captioning can be as tiring as sign language interpreting. Captioners can really use 5 to 10 minute breaks to limber up their muscles.

Mr. Smith encouraged hard of hearing and deaf consumers to demand their right to have CART available to them. If the organizers of a conference objects to providing you with captions, report them. If you are in a staff meeting and you are the only person needing captioning, then you probably won't need a big screen or LCD computer overhead projector---the computer laptop screen should suffice.

Lastly, he noted that if more court reporters knew about the many opportunities to provide accessibility to hard of hearing and deaf people, they would be encouraged to do real-time captioning work. There are many tangible benefits to being a captioner for meeting where deaf and hard of hearing people are present: you get good practice, you improve your ability to do professional work and last but not least, it is a safe and non-threatening improvement. In stark contrast to the tense and stern atmosphere of a courtroom [where testy exchanges can arise over a court reporter's spelling errors and court reporters are taken for granted], a SHHH or ALDA meeting is a place where people are laid-back and will be supportive and grateful to the court reporter.

This was a good seminar. I wish Ms. Baker had been able to present though. I was really hoping to find out more how one could obtain real time captioning services pro bono.

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Workshop: Computer/Electronic Accommodations for Individuals with Disabilities

Speaker: Paul Singleton

This workshop almost didn't get off the ground; luckily for the deaf speaker, his interpreter showed up at the last minute. This presentation was a bit difficult to do because there were some deaf people in the audience and the interpreter was to voice for the deaf speaker. Someone asked if the interpreter could place the microphone a bit further away from his lips for easier speechreading. Between trying to have the most optimum lighting so that the people in the audience could see the real time captions and and the deaf people could see the speaker's/ interpreter's signs, I felt it was a bit chaotic in the beginning.

Paul Singleton is a program analyst in the U. S. Department of Defense's (DOD) Computer Accommodations Program. He spent some time explaining what this program does and then discussed how the needs assessment for reasonable accommodation should work. First, conduct a job analysis (review current job description, and observe the work as it is accomplished). Second, identify the physical and cognitive skills required on the job. Then determine the areas that need require hardware (e. g. input and output computer devices) and software applications. Computer workstations may have to be configured more appropriately for a disabled individual (e. g. a dwarf). Last, select the accommodations to accomplish essential job requirements.

Part of this seminar was good, but I wish he had gone into more detail about how to do a needs assessment. An example of how the assessment process would work with a hard of hearing or deafened employee would have been very useful. I feel he spent too much time discussing how DOD tries to accommodate disabled employees and that DOD is still hiring individuals in targeted disabilities. He did provide a rather useful list of interpreting agencies in all 50 states and besides each listing it noted the rates and the type of interpreting services available. A similar list of captioning and CART services is in the works.

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Last, I went to SHHH National's annual business meeting, which is open to all members of SHHH National. There was a changing of the guard for the position of SHHH President (of the Board) and induction of new members of trustees. Donna Sorkin, SHHH executive director, talked a bit about what SHHH plans for the next few months are. The two thing I remember the most from her speech is that 1) the SHHH Journal will become known as "Hearing Loss - Journal for Self Help for Hard of Hearing people" and second, as a result of its experience working with SHHH, not only is Walt Disney World looking at installing assistive listening devices for several attractions; there is a possibility that they may look into captioning some of their shows as well. I have to admit here that SHHH does have a lot of clout now when it comes to discussing communication access issues with corporate entities. I could have gone to the Farewall Banquet that evening, but I wasn't that interested in shelling out another $35 for a banquet ticket and besides, I really didn't know who I could sit with.

All in all, I had a great time at the convention; I certainly learned a lot!

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