Deafness Disability Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

Deafness Disability - Essay Example While the mother of great inventor, Alexander Graham Bell was hard of hearing sine her birth, he used his earned funds to develop a school, called Volta Bureau, to teach deaf children. He also pursued actively the occupation of a deaf educator during late 1800s. People have used Different terminologies to define disability related with hearing impairments. For example, ‘deafened’ means the person who has acquired deafness later in life. While, ‘hearing impairment’ is a medical term, ‘hard of hearing’ is a sociological term. ‘Signing deaf’ is a term for deaf people who communicate using sign language.(Terminology, nd) Before describing this disability, it is essential to mention the difference between deafness and hearing impairment. While common sense provides the definition of being deaf as not being able to hear anything, the hearing impairment or hard of hearing means the ability to hear only partially. However, the fact that deaf people carry the residual hearing ability gives a new dimension to this definition. Accordingly, the physiological definition of deafness relates to the level of sound that the particular person is able to hear. This hearing sensitivity is normally described in terms of ‘decibels’ (dB). This level of sensitivity starts with zero as the perfect detection of an average person to hair faintest sound. The numbers above the zero level indicate the degree of hearing impairment. According to physiological intervention, people with hearing impairment of 90dB or above are considered as deaf and people with less than 90db hearing sensitivity level are considered ‘hard of hearing’. However, there is yet another viewpoint that relates the degree of hearing impairment with the impact it may have on speaking and developing a language, particularly in case of children. Accordingly, educators define a person as deaf who is not able to process, through audition, the linguistic information,