At the 5th Australian National Deafness Summit in Canberra during May 2008 I was astounded to hear some of the statistics on the increase in prevelance of deafness. While the statistics I quote are for the Australian market they apply to all markets.

Hearing loss impacts on individuals, their families, friends and colleagues. But hearing loss also has an impact on the wider community.

Subtitles and captions both deliver at least the speech content of a visual medium. Captions may provide more information but subtitles will help a hearing impaired person get a better quality experience from viewing television, movies or DVDS.

For those of us who have experienced late on-set deafness our lives have been turned upside down. Everything familiar has become strange because we can no longer interpret the world as we know it and we don’t know where we fit.

When deafness strikes later in life it is hard, however the impact of deafness is not just felt by the person who has lost their hearing because family members and friends often suffer.

For some people ordinary sounds are extraordinary. May is Better Speech and Hearing month in the USA. It is the month when focus is on educating the public about speech and hearing disorders, promoting treatment and understanding for people who my need it.

Many advancements in technology have added noise pollution to our environment in a way never before experienced. Hearing loss has developed in direct proportion to our exposure to this noise.

When ideas and theories are challenged a community breaks away from the mainstream culture and, as is the case with the Deaf, a new sub-culture is formed. A culture is a “System of symbols, including language and values and the patterned way of doing things shared by a given human group.”

Deaf Communities were formed as a result of adversity and alienation – a necessity for a group of people who were branded with a stigma who were ostracised and isolated from the world into which they were born. It was from this that their rich language was developed.

What is the Deaf Community? Does a Deaf Culture exist? Are the manual signs Deaf people use really a Language? And are Deaf people “whole persons or simply wounded ears”? These questions have troubled and confused the hearing world for thousands of years.