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Hearing People Barriers

555 Words3 Pages

The article “Employment and Adults Who are Deaf or Hard of Hearing: Current Status and Experiences of Barriers, Accommodations, and Stress in the Workplace” written by Renee Punch expresses the deep concerns for Deaf and hard of hearing people (DHH) in the workforce. Through research and experiments, Renee Punch reveals the challenges of DHH people in the workforce. Such challenges and barriers expressed are employment restrictions, lack of the accommodations and knowledge of accommodations, communication barriers, and work-related stress and fatigue.
The beginning of this article gives an overall informative about DHH people in the workforce. Certain information consists of “DHH people historically have experienced higher rates of unemployment …show more content…

Whether it is through lack of knowledge of accommodations or not, the workforce has an overall lack thereof all knowledge pertaining to the DHH community. Several of the experiment participants communicated to a common concern of the major barriers being with communication, especially during meetings but also with other coworkers who are unwilling to accommodate their hearing loss. Moreover, participants of one study published by Haynes (2014) researched the frequency of use and effectiveness of accommodations and strategies, such accommodations consist of speechreading, real-time transcription, and sign language interpreters. Speechreading was most common, but least effective, while real-time transcription was the most effective but least commonly used strategy. However, the study stated that "among sign language users, the presence of sign language interpreters in the room was frequent and perceived as highly effective" (Punch, 388). Ordinarily, accommodations will be met upon request, but there are still those that are unaware of the existence of any accommodations. For instance, there are several accommodations out there for the DHH people working in the medical field, such accommodations consist of modified stethoscopes, computer-assisted real-time captioning, video-relay phones, and Bluetooth streaming devices, along with e-mail and text messaging. Although these accommodations are available many are still unable to obtain them or don’t have anyone to teach them about the accommodations out there. There are also those few whose employers nonchalantly discourage the requesting of accommodations, due to not wanting to deal with the cost and

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