Deaf Bulgarians The Equal Access Campaign

VIDEO [CC] - Deaf News: Заслушай се - Campaign from Bulgarian public’s awareness of hearing health.

Заслушай се in Bulgarian, is an information campaign managed by a foundation of the same name which focuses public attention on the challenges people who are Deaf and Hard of Hearing face and raises the Bulgarian public’s awareness of hearing health.



Our team is made up entirely of volunteers. Some are Deaf and Hard of Hearing, others cannot but lend an ear to the cause. Our common goal is to ensure equal access for people who are Deaf and Hard of Hearing to information, education and professional development as well as their appropriate involvement in public life.



We work to raise the awareness of hearing health and will provide information about the dangers of noise pollution and the ways to protect one’s hearings.

At present, more than 120,000 people in Bulgaria have various degrees of hearing loss. A large part of them rely mainly on sign language as a means of daily communication and the need for professional sign language interpreters is ever growing. This is why we will support the creation of a modern national centre for sign language and services.



The Listen up campaign team works to improve the access to information and communication through the use of information technologies by all people with hearing loss. Visit us for more details http://zaslushaise.bg.



Follow Заслушай се:

Subscribe - https://youtube.com/zaslushaise

Facebook - https://facebook.com/zaslushaise

Official site - http://zaslushaise.bg

Forbes: Changing Technologies For The Deaf

Deaf News: Forbes.com - 4 Game-Changing Technologies For The Deaf And Hard Of Hearing.

The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that there are more than 360 million people worldwide with a disabling hearing loss, including 32 million children and one-third of people over 65 years of age. Hearing loss may result from genetic causes, complications at birth, certain infectious diseases, chronic ear infections, the use of particular drugs, exposure to excessive noise and aging.



One of the main impacts of hearing loss is on the individual’s ability to communicate with others, since spoken language development is often delayed in children with deafness. Limited access to services and exclusion from communication can have a significant impact on everyday life, causing feelings of loneliness, isolation and frustration, particularly among older people with hearing loss.



Recent advances in technology have the potential to improve the quality of life for those who are Deaf or Hard of Hearing. Here’s a look at four products in this space that caught our attention.



MotionSavvy UNI: MotionSavvy, founded by a team of students from Rochester Institute of Technology’s National Technical Institute for the Deaf, announced “the world’s first two-way communication software for the Deaf.” UNI translates American Sign Language (ASL) into speech, and speech into text. It utilizes a special camera to track the location of both hands and all ten fingers. Graphic representations of the hands provide live feedback to make sure gestures are being captured correctly. The software’s dictionary can be expanded with customized signs added by the user. There’s also an option to upload those signs to the Internet, to share with others. The more an individual uses the system, the more accurate and tailored it becomes. To facilitate the Hearing-to-Deaf half of the communication, the package also includes Dragon Nuance Pro, one of the leading pieces of voice recognition software. Interested customers will have to wait for MotionSavvy UNI, but not long.



The company is planning to release it in September 2015. The video below gives a high level overview of the concept... Read Full Story with Videos: forbes.com/sites/robertszczerba/2015/04/21/4-game-changing-technologies-for-the-deaf-and-hard-of-hearing/



Related Post:

New Technology of Communication for the Deaf

Future Of Electronic Devices For The Deaf

Sign Language Telephone - Documentary Film

VIDEO [CC] - 1979 Bell Labs project for the Deaf to communicate over telephone lines using American Sign Language.



This 1979 film examines a Bell Laboratory research project conducted by Kenneth Knowlton and Vivien Tartter. The team devised a way of using 27 points of light placed on an individual’s hands and face to allow the hearing impaired to use American Sign Language (ASL) to communicate remotely. The goal was to find a way to take images of the points of light at each end of a conversation so the images “could be coded to the capacity of one telephone line.” Thus ASL, the primary language for most Deaf people, could be used to conduct conversations over standard telephone lines, without requiring any greater capacity than a regular phone call.

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Knowlton was a prominent figure at Bell Labs for many years and is well represented in other videos on the AT&T Archive Channel. At the time this film was made Tartter was a linguist at Rutgers University and continues today as a professor at City College in New York.



In 1981, two years after this video, Tartter and Knowlton published a paper in the scientific journal Nature detailing their work and findings at Bell Labs. The article, “Perception of Sign-Language from an Array of 27 Moving Spots.” details the methods and results of the project, including a transcript of a sign language conversation conducted via television using their method. The paper concludes that the “demonstration suggests the possibility of developing a sign language telephone.” A New York Times article about the published piece soon followed and the subject drew attention in newspapers across the country.



While the system the team conceived was never developed into a final, usable technology, it is a fascinating step in the long procession of efforts to find ways for the Deaf to use the telephone for communicating, as in 2009 when AT&T received the TDI James C. Masters Promotion Award “for providing innovative products and services that address the needs of people who are Deaf or Hard of Hearing.“

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