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Students with communication disorders present unique challenges to educators working toward fostering an inclusive classroom. For children with speech/language impairments, expressing themselves either academically or socially may present obstacles requiring communicative support and facilitation. For children with hearing loss, full access to educational material will be difficult without technological and/or visual support. Many children may have a combination of disorders, requiring a team of educators and other professionals to provide educational content and classroom support in the most inclusive way possible. This chapter is intended to provide an overview of variety of communication disorders, along with guidelines for improving student access across educational settings.

The purpose of this paper is to highlight the level of hearing loss in the population and describe the joint health and social care response in Hartlepool to the needs of this group of people.

The approach included a review of the literature, the application of national prevalence tables to local population estimates, and a review of the adequacy of current service provision available to people with a hearing loss.

More than 14,700 people out of a total population of 91,000 living in Hartlepool are estimated to have some degree of hearing loss. This compares with only 1,046 people registered with the adult social care team although 13,800 people were found to be registered with the local audiology department. The review found that a broad range of services was already in place across health and social care although some areas were identified for service improvement which are currently being addressed.

Drawing attention to the needs of a section of the community that is virtually invisible, this review served to highlight the scale of hearing loss prevalence in the population, to estimate the number of people with hearing loss in a local population using data that has been available for almost two decades (although not widely adopted), and demonstrates a unique cross‐sectoral approach to assessing and responding to the needs of people who have a loss of hearing.

Hearing loss impacts language and communication, a building block for relationships and society. Most teachers and professionals rarely have a young child with hearing loss in their classroom. The “unknown” can be a source of stress for the professionals and the families alike. Understanding the characteristics of this population of students, the diagnostic process, the possible early intervention supports, and practices to use with young children with hearing loss may help teachers and professionals approach students and families with more confidence. This chapter will outline each of the aforementioned with an emphasis on understanding parental perspective.

With a push toward inclusion of students with disabilities in the general education classroom, students who are d/Deaf or hard of hearing (DHH) are exposed to greater educational opportunities. Given the largely verbal nature of traditional classroom instruction, there has been a need for advancements in technology to provide more access to the material covered by teachers and in class discussions. In addition, the COVID-19 pandemic and the transition to virtual learning also brought to light many additional challenges for the DHH population, which can, in part, be lessened through technological advancements.

The purpose of this paper is to explore audiologists, views and experiences of working with older adults with dementia.

An online survey was distributed to audiologists working in the UK NHS and private sector via their professional organisations. A total of 312 audiologists took part in the study. The survey collected both quantitative and qualitative data. Basic descriptive statistics summarised the quantitative responses. The qualitative data were analysed using conventional thematic approaches.

The quantitative data demonstrated that the vast majority of audiologists had treated someone with dementia (96 per cent). Despite this, 65 per cent of respondents did not feel adequately supported to help this service user population. Four overarching themes were used to explain the qualitative data: integrated and individualised care; formal (including training) vs experiential knowledge; the interaction between dementia and hearing and using the technology.

The self-selecting nature of the sample is a limitation which needs to be taken into account when considering the transferability and implications of the findings.

Given the anticipated increase in rates of dementia within the population and the potential for hearing impairment to exacerbate the symptoms; this study highlights the unique role audiologists have. The need for more training and development for this professional group is also identified.

This is one of the first papers to explore audiologists, views and experiences of working with people with dementia. As such, it highlights some interesting areas worthy of further research using both quantitative and qualitative methods.

Despite developments in the fields of technology and health, some people may still have congenital or acquired disabilities. In our world, where one in every seven consumers is disabled, these consumers also have the right to utilize the services offered to them in the best way as the other six. With the developed technology and innovations, it has become easier and more inexpensive for disabled consumers to access products and services. The number of disabled consumers is also increasing day by day in the tourism sector. However, the designs of touristic products are not suitable for every type of disability. The concept in disabled tourism that is known as “Quiet Tourism” in the literature represents the group including consumers with hearing and speech loss. This section aims to present consumers with hearing and speech loss who have to continue their lives this way becoming a new market for accommodation firms and what types of difficulties and opportunities may be encountered. It is aimed to show that the existing infrastructure at accommodation firms is not adequate, but there is a considerable potential.

The world revolves around sound. Children who are deaf/hard of hearing (D/HH) lack access to sound, thus need careful monitoring and planning to ensure they have access to adequate language models and supports to develop a strong language foundation. It is this foundation that is needed to ensure D/HH children are able to achieve developmental and academic milestones. Research is emerging to suggest specific intervention strategies that can be used to support D/HH children from birth throughout their educational career. In this chapter, we highlight several strategies that can be used to support communication, language, academic, and social/emotional growth. We freely admit that this is in no way a comprehensive and exhaustive list, but rather only scratches the surface. The field of deaf education and related research and technology is constantly changing. To ensure adequate educational access, it is highly recommended that a professional specialized in hearing loss be a part of the educational team any time a child is identified as having any degree or type of hearing loss.

Hearing aid (HA) using is an option for enhancing the sound transmission. It effectively improves hearing ability during communication. In Thailand, two-third of hearing impaired persons were elders, while the utilization of an HA was low. This study aims to explore how the decision was made on the use of HA among the hearing impaired elderly.

Mixed-methods sequential explanatory design was used by starting with a retrospective study to identify the prevalence of HA use and influencing factors including demographic and clinical data. Total, 199 elders with moderate to severe hearing impairment were enrolled. Qualitative data collection for thematic analysis was conducted by interviewing 28 participants to reveal elders’ subjective reasoning.

It was found that 25.63% of elders used an HA, whereas age, types of health insurance and disability registration were significant influencing factors. Six themes of subjective reasoning emerged including social activities, disability perspective, social support, medical and personnel, rights and accessibility and benefit of HA, which determined the elders’ decisions on HA use.

This study broadened insights of the elders’ decision process on HA use, which was mutually made by both health-care professional and care recipients. The elders themselves would make the final decision. Not only objective indications but also subjective reasoning of users played significant roles on HA acquisition. To enhance HA use among hearing impaired elders, patient engagement in decision-making was crucial while hearing counselling and elimination of reimbursement barriers became essential.

Hearing impaired users often find it difficult to listen to voice over television, computer or public announcement systems due to background noise, music or poor sound quality. This paper presents a hearing impairment simulator that can help digital content developers to understand the auditory perception of hearing impaired users. Existing hearing impairment simulations often fail to publish results on validation or running the system on stored files. The present work describes validation result on a hearing impairment simulator and link to download the system that can simulate any sound stored as a wav file.

This work presents a simulator with a downloadable link to the software and results on a couple of user trials involving users with varying degrees of hearing impairment validating the system. The simulator also simulates frequency smearing which is not available in most online hearing impairment simulators. The simulator is part of a bigger project which also involves simulating visual, cognitive and motor impairment.

The result shows the present implementation can accurately simulate hearing perception for spoken voice. It also demonstrates that both frequency attenuation based on audiogram response and smearing are needed for accurate simulation as random frequency attenuation does not distort the sound well enough to be inaudible.

It should be noted that this simulation is not accurate enough to be used for medical purpose, rather aims to be an engineering tool to simulate approximately correct auditory perception of hearing impaired people. However, like other researches on user modelling and simulation in HCI, this simulator aims to enhance the design space where designers can optimize volume and quality of sound output and if necessary of background music or noise.

This paper presents a hearing impairment simulator that can help digital content developers to judge the sound quality of their content for hard of hearing users.

Existing literature on hearing impairment simulators either presents a software without detailed result on validation or focuses on detailed theoretical results on psychology without any easy deployable software. Most existing software also does not allow running simulation on stored file which limits their purpose. This work presents a simulator with a downloadable link to the software and results on a couple of user trials involving users with varying degrees of hearing impairment validating the system. The simulator also simulates frequency smearing which is not available in most online hearing impairment simulators.