Deaf Awareness Week - 5 - 11 May 2025

What's on

Supporting hearing impaired students

Wednesday 11 June, 3pm to 4.30pm, LFA/144

Drawing on the experiences of staff and current students, this workshop explores how teaching practices can be made more accessible to hearing impaired students. 

Sign up for Supporting hearing impaired students

Advice and support

When you meet a deaf person

• Make sure you have the person’s attention before you start speaking.
• If possible, find a place to talk that has good lighting, away from noise and distractions.
• Face the person while you are speaking, don’t turn away.
• Speak clearly without shouting and not too slowly, and use normal lip movements, facial expressions and gestures.
• Use plain language and don’t waffle.
• Repeat yourself if necessary.
• Never say ‘It doesn’t matter’.
• If the person doesn’t understand you, don’t give up! Try saying it differently, write it down or draw a picture.
• Speak one at a time, don’t talk over each other.
• Keep your mouth visible: don’t look away while speaking or cover your mouth with your hands.
• Smile and relax.
• Please use gestures.

If the person uses a sign language interpreter, always remember to talk directly to the person you are communicating with, not the interpreter.

Ways to support a member of staff with hearing loss in the workplace

• Position the member of staff with hearing loss in a work area that has good acoustics and where they can see the rest of the room.
• Adjust the layout of a meeting room and use good lighting to help everybody see each other clearly, which is important for lip-reading.
• If you play music in your workplace, either turn this off or down.
• Provide meeting papers in advance as this will help the member of staff prepare so they are able to focus on the speakers and/or discussions at the meeting.
• You can also use Google slides for your presentations, which enables you to turn on live captioning which could help a deaf person be able to follow the presentation better (please note this only works in Google Chrome). To learn more see Google’s guidance notes on live captioning. 
• For online meetings use the following facilities in Zoom and Google Hangouts:
  • recording (with attendees permission). This gives attendees the chance to go back and review and/or check some of the content
  • captioning
  • chat functions
  • Zoom's support for sign language interpretation (see below)
• See the University's:
  • good practice guide to assist individuals with hearing loss
  • list of meeting rooms on campus that have hearing loops installed.

Support for students who have hearing loss

• Students with hearing loss can contact Disability Services for advice on what support is available to them. 

If you're supporting students who have hearing loss

• See useful guidance if you are a member of staff Supporting students who are Deaf or hearing impaired students

Resources

“My ears don't work, but the little grey cells are firing well on all pistons” the journey of a deaf immunologist. Allison is a Professor of Immunology in Hull York Medical School. Allison has been profoundly deaf since childhood, and was recently profiled by the British Society of Immunology. Read Allison's journey that highlights the challenges that deaf scientists face.

Media editing skills guide: how to use the different supported options around captioning, subtitling and generating transcripts, to help create accessible resources.

Creating captions and transcripts in Panopto: specific guidance for teaching staff from the Digital Education Team explaining how to create and edit captions and transcripts.

Support for sign language interpretation in Zoom: captions are enabled as standard in Zoom but there is now support in meetings if you are providing a sign interpreter. There is a setting for Zoom users to add their own interpreter to a Zoom meeting and an option to allow 'sign language interpretation'. The meeting host scheduling/editing a meeting in their Zoom web portal can include the email address of a person nominated to provide sign language support. Participants in the meeting will then have the option to enable interpretation and have an extra window open in the meeting to show the sign language interpreter.

IT Support for staff and students who are deaf or have hearing loss: there is an option to add access notes to your IT account, so if you contact IT support, they will not contact you by phone or will be aware that you use an assistive listening device. 

Sources of information

• UK Council for Deafness
• RNID - Dear Awareness tips
• SignHealth
• Limping Chicken - Tips for working remotely when you're deaf
• AbilityNet Factsheet - Hearing Loss and Computing

Support for students

• Disability Services
• Disabled Students’ Network
• The Digital Accessibility Unit (digacc-support@york.ac.uk) is a source of digital support and guidance for students and staff

Keep an eye out - a brand-new British Sign Language (BSL) student Society will be launching at Welcome Week 2025! Whether you're interested in learning or practicing BSL, or just curious about D/deaf culture, come and discover what the society is all about.

Support for staff:

• Human Resources
• INCLUDE network
• The Digital Accessibility Unit (digacc-support@york.ac.uk) is a source of digital support and guidance for students and staff