Deaf Awareness Week 8-13th May 2022
Deaf Awareness Week is all about promoting the positive aspects of living with deafness.
There are over 50,000 deaf children and young people in the UK and one in five adults in the UK is deaf or has hearing loss.
Every day, you’re likely to meet someone who is deaf or has some level of hearing loss. There are 12 million people affected in the UK, and they all face different communication challenges that can lead to frustration and loneliness.
What is Deafness?
Deafness, or hearing loss, happens when one or more parts of the ear aren’t working effectively. To understand this, it’s useful to know how the ear works.
The ear and how it works
The ear has two main functions.
It receives sound and converts it into signals that the brain can understand.
It helps us to balance.
The two functions are closely related.
The ear is the first part of the hearing system. The outside part of the ear (pinna) catches sound waves and directs them down the ear canal. The waves then cause the eardrum to vibrate.
These vibrations are passed across the middle ear by three tiny bones: the malleus, incus and stapes (sometimes known as the hammer, anvil and stirrup, known together as the ossicles). The bones increase the strength of the vibrations before they pass through the oval window into the cochlea.
The cochlea looks like a snail’s shell. It's filled with fluid and contains thousands of tiny sound-sensitive cells. These cells are known as hair cells. The vibrations entering the cochlea cause the fluid and hair cells to move, much like the movement of seaweed on the seabed when waves pass over it.
As the hair cells move, they create a small electrical charge or signal. The auditory nerve carries these signals to the brain where they are understood as sound.
For an ear to work fully and pick up sound, all of these parts must work well.
Hard of hearing – people who have some level of hearing loss, are often described as hard of hearing. They may experience some difficulty in hearing speech and may no longer hear people whispering.
Deafened – People who have lost their hearing are often described as deafened. This could be because of an accident, operation, or infection. They are likely to have learned to speak, read, and write before they lost their hearing.
Deaf – people who are born without hearing or lose their hearing as an infant are often described as Deaf with a capital D. They are likely to use Sign Language as their first language and have little or no access to English. They will have more severe profound deafness.
Very few deaf children have no useful hearing. Most deaf children can hear some sounds at certain frequencies and loudness, and with the use of hearing aids or implants they are often able to hear more sounds.
Please visit https://www.ndcs.org.uk/get-involved/ for more information.
https://ukcod.org/Downloads/Useful-tips-for-Deaf-Awareness.pdf how to be deaf aware.
