How feasible is Government Sector for a Persons who is hearing impaired? My Experiences: Part 1

   "Life is always a strange humdrum affair. We have no time to stand and stare."

   Under the Act of 1955 (Equal Opportunities, Rights Protection, and Full Participation), Central Government provides 1% Horizontal Reservation for a persons with hearing impairment(HI)* with objectives to facilitate normal life for such disabled persons. But does, providing reservation alone tantamount to well being of HI or any Persons with Disabilities? What has the government done to provide ease of equal working environment to them as that of any abled person? Why is it even getting proper training as an abled person is getting yet a struggle for me? This article is written based on my own experience as a Hearing Impaired trainee IAS Officer.

  When I joined LBSNAA, some esteemed faculties did try to ensure that I get equal learning opportunity but sadly this was not the case once Covid19 pandemic came into existence. Not that I blame them, but every trainee whether abled or disabled should be kept in mind when facilitating online training. One module which I did not like was movie review module. I had to keep searching for a movie on other OTT platform as those provided by the academy was without subtitles. Even for other modules, some audio-video use to get uploaded.  I always have to keep informing, I am hearing impaired, I don't understand video modes without closed caption. This has remained my constant struggle. It is not that Webex, zoom doesn't support closed caption feature. They do but how willing are government training institute to explore them? This is just one part. Recently my administrative training started in UPAAM( Uttar Pradesh Academy of Administration and Management), and again due to pandemic, the training got shifted online. Again, I have to go through all the struggles. Some faculties do-not even have Presentation Slides, the classes are completely oral-based. Some faculties have slides with a few bullet point written and the explanation are oral. The academy does provide audio for a later hearing, but when a person is hearing impaired how is it going to help them? I have to put my full energy to understand what the listener is saying on video call yet I fail to understand most of it, but it does drain all energy out of me. The training is becoming less of the learning experience and more of tormenting experience for me. Though I must mention that when we had 2-3 days of institutional training, the institute tried to explore options for me like the use of Google speech translator.

    The pandemic has put everyone on edge but being a person who relies on lip-reading, it has made it very difficult for me to communicate. It also reduces the level of speech transmitted from the mouth. It is again not a good experience to witness people discussing things and me being mute spectator trying to get what is the topic about. It has led to a reduction in social interactions. Most people have to remove the mask to speak to me, this put them at risk as well as me. The imagination of me contracting the novel coronavirus and being greeted by people who are wearing the thick mask with PPE KIT and muffled speech coming out of it is enough to bring a shiver down my spine. Also communicating at 2 feet distance distorts the sound quality and it is a big challenge. Nowhere have I seen people promoting transparent mask to help the hearing-impaired community. I read that Tamil Nadu and Uttarakhand are coming up with such mask.
 
   As part of district training, we have attachments with different departments to understand it's functioning. Though most of the officers are accommodating yet I also have some bitter experience. I find it difficult to understand new accents. I do catch some accents easily but most are difficult for me to catch up immediately. When I don't understand, I do make it a point to let the speaker know that I am not following and that I am hearing impaired. But, some insensitive government official, take it an opportunity to chide me. I vividly remember in one such attachment due to my inability to understand the official, I was questioned as "from which state do you belong that you are not understanding"? "Haven't you read these during your Civil Services Preparation days"? "Don't you know Hindi"? "Why are you not understanding this"? Such comment is deterring and also insensitive. Another part of this coin is being constantly judged. "Ma'am I don't think you have much hearing problem, you are understanding me properly"? "Ma'am, how much is your disability"? I do get some unwelcoming sympathetic remarks as well. "Ma'am this service is basically of pen and paper, it would be okay for you." Though to facilitate my training, my mentor did provide me with an assistant who use to note down important point and share with me later. Some officials would communicate  only with her as if she has come for attachment and not me. I expect people to do eye contact with me as well and not just with my interpreter.

    Another aspect is the video conferencing meetings which are being encouraged these days. The struggle is the same as mentioned in the first paragraph. I don't know why there is no active use of closed captions/ Real-time Caption. Exploration of online technologies might help. There is so little exploration/ guidelines on how to provide equal access to disabled employees in the Government sector. I tried to search for any act/rules pertaining to it but couldn't find anything substantial in Rights of Person with Disabilities Act,2016. So what are the options? How can we government sector more feasible for a hearing-impaired persons? We don't need to do any extra effort, just small steps in creating a feasible environment would have a long-reaching effect. Some minor things which can be done:

1) In Online training, providing closed captions would make it more accessible to hearing impaired. It can even help others read something which they may have missed. It is not too much to ask for access to all training material to have a fair chance in carrying the job's responsibilities properly.

2) Meetings can be conducted with proper agenda, well-planned notes on what all are to be discussed. Written as well as oral communications should be encouraged. It also helps if people avoid talking over to each other and let one person speak at a time to get clarity on who the speaker is. Moreover, giving a proper seat with good visual access ample lightning and direct line of sight of the primary speaker would also help. Some speeches of higher officials are also planned, they can be easily transcribed.

3) Technological innovations like google translate, speech to text conversation are useful for one to one conversation but for meetings with many participants may be a professional captioner or a live captioning solution can help ( I don't know if live captioning or professional captioner exists in India)

4) In Covid19 times, Production and encouragement of transparent face mask can help persons with hearing impairments as people like me rely on lip-reading and facial expressions to communicate.

5) If you know a person with a hearing disability, ask them their preferred mode of communication. Try to text and communicate if that is preferred.

6) Do not try to belittle others or be judgemental towards them. Be a responsible person. You don't know what struggles a person is going through or how much effort a person is making to fit into mainstream society. If not encourage, least you can do is to not discourage.

Just providing reservations to bring a person with a disability into a job is not enough. There should be enough means to sustain them so that they also feel encouraged and motivated to contribute to societies. Maybe there should be training for some support staff who assist persons with disabilities in carrying their duties. It does take lots of energy and effort to understand and actively participate in the communication. Equal opportunities are not when disable have to repeatedly ask for support for equal access, it is when we are sensitised enough to provide them equal access without them asking for it every time

* “Hearing Impairment” means loss of sixty decibels or more in the better ear in the conversational   range of frequencies

Disclaimer: The views expressed are My own and might not necessarily echo views of other hearing impaired(HI) persons.The intention is solely to give an insight into my own experiences as an HI. The post by no means intends to Malign any institution/person.

Prranata Aishwarya,

IAS  Trainee Officer 2019,

Assistant Magistrate/Collector Lucknow

Hearing Impairment and Me

Hearing Impairment is one of the least talked about and probably most misunderstood disability. Unlike other disabilities, it is not immediately visible. On 3rd March every year World Hearing Day is held to raise awareness on hearing loss and deafness, I am sharing my own experiences to throw some light on predicament of people suffering from hearing loss. 

According to WHO, Over 5% of the world’s population – or 466 million people – has disabling hearing loss (432 million adults and 34 million children). It is estimated that by 2050 over 900 million people – or one in every ten people – will have disabling hearing loss.

Those suffering from hearing impairment often hesitate to have conversations with people. Particularly in India, most of us are highly judgemental and we label those as rude, arrogant and sometimes as ‘weird’ or ‘crazy’.They also often face insensitivity of others through mockery, being isolated socially, people hesitant to talk to them. I ,myself, have hearing impairment and have been through most of these cases.  The plight of hearing impaired is so unheard that they often fall into depression or have extreme low level of confidence. The level of awareness about hearing impairment is extremely low in our country and most people with such weakness continue to suffer in silence. Only things which we know about hearing loss is data and statistics, we rarely talk with such people about their struggles and what they go through on everyday basis. 

Recently, as Part of my IAS training, we had Bharat Darshan Program in which we visited various Insitution, public sector, private sector , NGOs among other places as part of my training. Many of these places claimed to be disabled friendly; but what surprised me was that most of these places consider providing wheel chair access as equivalent to considering the place disabled friendly. We need to understand that disability is not just one facets but has multiple facets, and to make these places disabled friendly, we need to cover all the criteria. As a part of our attachment, we were often shown short videos to get to know about the institute which we were visiting but hardly any of them had any form of subtitles. 

I am often told that if you don’t understand something, ask for it. But, is it really, so simple to keep on asking for same things again and again? Repeated asking, often leads to embarrassing situations. It also leads to decrease in confidence level. We need to understand that equality is not about getting things only after being asked but  having facilities which wold makes things simple for us without asking for it. 

Many of us tend to hesitate to wear hearing aids. We have developed the mindset that if a person wears spectacles, it’s normal but those with hearing aids aren’t. We need to brush off such thinking. We need to talk more about these issues. We need to understand that if someone with profound, severe hearing loss is able to communicate with you, we should be more encouraging instead of discouraging and being judgemental that the person has hearing loss still he/she is communicating well.

We need to make our society more inclusive to people with hearing impaired. We need to understand that everyone is not born equal. As a part of my Village Visit Training, I met a young girl of 12 years old who was hard of hearing and could hear only when people say in her ears. She had applied for hearing aids from district administration but her file was stuck. Her teachers told that she is a bright student but has stopped communicating with others owning to her failure to understand the conversation. We need to make our Government Healthcare more efficient to deal with such issues.

Furthermore, it is common belief that the most convenient solution to people who wears hearing aids is to make them sit in the front and voila they would start understanding it all. This may helps some, but not all. I often struggle to understand accents of some people and too loud noise owning to sitting in front and the speaker being on mike, distorts all the sound and as a result I understand very little. We need to understand the phase at which they are able to understand things. 

We should always be encouraging to those around us. As such encouraging remarks, do helps in boosting confidence. We need to make workplace, training place comfortable enough for such people.We shouldn’t let hearing loss limit a person’s full potential. 

As part of making India more disabled friendly, government gives horizontal reservation to PwD people but are all training institutes, government offices well equipped to work with such people? We can learn from countries like Singapore where every new born receives a hearing test. It is also one of the few countries where even Deaf can drive. When I visited Singapore, I was amazed to see how disabled friendly it is. Places had audio as well as written note for everyone to understand. The government should also think about adding a chapter in the course curriculum to make younger generations understand about people with disabilities.

So, we all should pledge to make our country more accessible to those with hearing loss.

P.S: All the views expressed are my own. 

Prranata Aishwarya,

IAS  Trainee Officer 2019,

Phase 1- LBSNAA