Deaf Awareness Week is almost upon us - it is Monday 7th May to Sunday 13th May and there are sure to be activities and publicity events going on throughout the week, why not get involved?
Deaf Awareness Week is co-ordinated by the UK Council on Deafness, the UK’s leading membership body for organisations concerned with deafness. They provide access to specialist information, conferences and collaborative working opportunities, whilst providing a collective membership voice to political and cross sector partners. You can find the website here
Here are some interesting facts taken from the Deaf Awareness Week website;
Nearly 15% of the population have some degree of deafness. For every 10,000 people:
10 will be born profoundly deaf. They probably get little or no benefit from Hearing Aids and mainly use Sign Language to communicate.
20 will have become profoundly deaf. They may use Sign Language and probably also lipread.
100 will be partially deaf. They may have difficulty following what is being said, even with hearing aids. Mostly they will lipread and some use sign language as well.
600 will be hard of hearing. They will be able to follow what is being said with a hearing aid and will be able to use a telephone if it has an adjustable volume or has been designed to be used with a hearing aid.
800 will be mildly hard of hearing. They may have difficulty following conversations particularly in large groups or in noisy situations. Some will wear hearing aids and many find lipreading helpful.
- British Sign Language (BSL) is the first or preferred language of around 70,000 people in the UK.
- About 2 million people in Britain wear hearing aids, maybe another million would benefit from doing so.
- Almost all deaf and hard of hearing people rely on lipreading to some extent.
- Many combine signs from BSL with English in order to communicate.
