Miss-Delectable
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A book at bedtime invaluable - Local & National - News - Belfast Telegraph
One reader described my article last week on speech recognition as "pie in the sky". He contacted me by text and said these new advances in technology were welcome, but that after many years of subtitles on TV and video we were no nearer the Promised Land I was envisaging. "Anyway", he went on, "precious few deaf children can read well, so the Holy Grail you predict from speech recognition is still a long way off."
The reader is a friend of mine and in my texted reply I agreed that Pie in the Sky is a good analogy - but the same was said of cars at one time, and aeroplanes, and phones, and computers. I told him about the lift I had got recently in another friend's BMW and how just by speaking an address the sat-nav screen in his car changed to a map of the way. A breathtaking though admittedly limited illustration of the benefit of voice recognition.
I made it clear in the article that a sizeable part of the deaf community rely on sign language for communication and my friend is correct in saying that many deaf like this are not cognisant with written English and may not be attracted to the proposed new technology of voice or speech recognition. But figures supplied by the RNID imply that the estimated 4,000 sign language users in the province are vastly outnumbered by the approximately 200,000 hard of hearing and deafened people to whom the printed word is a sacrosanct method of communication.
Another reader has contacted me by email about her seven-year-old son who has unilateral hearing, meaning he is deaf in one ear, and the difficulties experienced in school when the problem was compounded by glue ear in his good ear. A test at the ENT clinic showed a hearing loss of over 100 decibels, which most experts accept as the threshold of profound deafness, so it's understandable that the mother is worried about how this will affect his education, especially in the sphere of English language.
I discussed the matter with my wife Evelyn, as she lost her own hearing from mumps just before her fifth birthday and has had 20 years' experience of teaching deaf children. She said that as the child already had speech and language that was a good start.
She advises parents in a similar predicament to talk clearly to the child and make sure he understands what is happening around him. See that he has books appropriate to his age level and interest; make reading fun and try to have a bedtime story every night so books are regarded as a pleasure.
Being cut off from much subconscious language deaf children need the written word more than their hearing peers to build up patterns of language in their minds.
The help Evelyn got this way was invaluable.
One reader described my article last week on speech recognition as "pie in the sky". He contacted me by text and said these new advances in technology were welcome, but that after many years of subtitles on TV and video we were no nearer the Promised Land I was envisaging. "Anyway", he went on, "precious few deaf children can read well, so the Holy Grail you predict from speech recognition is still a long way off."
The reader is a friend of mine and in my texted reply I agreed that Pie in the Sky is a good analogy - but the same was said of cars at one time, and aeroplanes, and phones, and computers. I told him about the lift I had got recently in another friend's BMW and how just by speaking an address the sat-nav screen in his car changed to a map of the way. A breathtaking though admittedly limited illustration of the benefit of voice recognition.
I made it clear in the article that a sizeable part of the deaf community rely on sign language for communication and my friend is correct in saying that many deaf like this are not cognisant with written English and may not be attracted to the proposed new technology of voice or speech recognition. But figures supplied by the RNID imply that the estimated 4,000 sign language users in the province are vastly outnumbered by the approximately 200,000 hard of hearing and deafened people to whom the printed word is a sacrosanct method of communication.
Another reader has contacted me by email about her seven-year-old son who has unilateral hearing, meaning he is deaf in one ear, and the difficulties experienced in school when the problem was compounded by glue ear in his good ear. A test at the ENT clinic showed a hearing loss of over 100 decibels, which most experts accept as the threshold of profound deafness, so it's understandable that the mother is worried about how this will affect his education, especially in the sphere of English language.
I discussed the matter with my wife Evelyn, as she lost her own hearing from mumps just before her fifth birthday and has had 20 years' experience of teaching deaf children. She said that as the child already had speech and language that was a good start.
She advises parents in a similar predicament to talk clearly to the child and make sure he understands what is happening around him. See that he has books appropriate to his age level and interest; make reading fun and try to have a bedtime story every night so books are regarded as a pleasure.
Being cut off from much subconscious language deaf children need the written word more than their hearing peers to build up patterns of language in their minds.
The help Evelyn got this way was invaluable.