Hearing Impaired Need Better Visuals in a Crisis

As promised earlier this week, CHORE is following up here with comments by a representative of the hearing-impaired community at the Honolulu Community Media Council's “Media and Emergency Response” panel discussion.

Before we do that, we call your attention once again to yesterday’s post with our response to State Adjutant General Robert Lee’s commentary that takes issue with just about everything CHORE has written since the October 15th earthquakes:

General Lee Launches Counter-Offensive at
CHORE; We Respond with Defense-in-Depth

You’ll find our long paragraph-by-paragraph response to General Lee below today’s post.

When Will the Hearing Get It?

Deaf interpreter Larry Littleton of Kauai reminded the Media Council audience that communication must not be merely audible. It must be visual, as well.

“In any emergency, I LOOK for information,” he says. “In any emergency, the hearing LISTEN for information. We are both trying to obtain the same thing, in different modes.”

Littleton later emailed CHORE and asked pointedly, “When are these hearing people going to get it? It is a mockery of any emergency agency to put up a ‘visual emergency scroll’ when NO ONE is monitoring the scroll at the station where it is uploaded.

“Because, if you are one of the over 6,000 hearing-impaired people who reside in the state of Hawaii and you are watching TV with closed captions, the captions will overlap the emergency scroll! This does not include the untold thousands of visitors with hearing loss here on holiday. And I'm not talking about the culturally deaf; I'm talking about our ohana, bless them, who cannot hear due to advancing age.”

Littleton knows of what he speaks. He’s been deaf since 1962 and has more than four decades dealing with inadequate communications designed and dispatched by the hearing. Without a doubt, Littleton or one of his colleagues should have been asked to participate as a member of the Comprehensive Communications Review Committee that studied how to improve emergency response.

He could have given them both an ear and eye full. Thanks for your comments, Larry.