Whenever the Sultan appears on television, a small box on the lower left hand corner of the television always appears without fail. The box contains a woman who uses sign language to express what they are saying in the news. It got me wondering what kind of sign language it is and also, got me wondering why there is no captioning on most television channels but for the announcements having to do with the Sultan, there are definitely disability accessible equipment standards.
This observation excited my curiousity to learn more about the knowledge and lack therof, how to go about helping (if even at all) people with physical disabilities in this part of the world who wish to have the same opportunities hearing and non-disability people are fortunate to have. There are over 110 writings about deaf people and the use of sign language in the Arab countries in the East of the Meditteranean and South Western Asia. Something interesting to note right off the bat is “Deaf and severely hearing impaired children and young people in urban and rural SSWA have often been treated as sub-human during the past four millennia. At best, deaf adults were treated as perpetual children, and they continued to be so treated by aid organizsations throughout the 20th century” (M. Miles, 2006-Signs of Development in Deaf South and South West Asia: histories, cultural identities, resistance to cultural Imperialism).
In South West Asia the renowned writer nicknamed al-Jahiz (776-868 CE), who was himself subjected to social prejudices, wrote one of the world’s earliest treatises rejecting negative attitudes and proclaiming that people with disabilities could be full and worthy members of society (Al-Jahiz, edition 1998). Apparently in Al-Jahiz’s ‘Book of Animals” he wrote about the different levels of hearing loss and deafness and how people can act in social settings based on the level of handicap (M. Miles, 2006). “Jepson (1991c) was clear that a ‘significant portion’ of interviewees from various parts of rural India considered deafness a natural thing, a simple fact of life which did not require any special measures, beliefs or behaviour” (M. Miles, 2006). To me, this is a pretty innovative thing that the Sultan has caught on to when I compare it with other countries in the region of South West Asia and South East Asia.
I don’t think the reason for no captions and only the presence of a sign language interpretor in the little box on the television channel is because of a lack of understanding of people with various levels of hearing loss. I could be biased because of my childhood in the West, but I feel that it is a mixture of both a lack of a solid basic understanding of the various levels of hearing loss a person can have as well as a lack of care of the importance a deaf person (who is able to function) can have in a society. I personally can hear people talking but do not hear well enough to hear the types of frequencies of a person’s voice that are on a television speaker. A lot of people seem to get confused with me being able to speak on a telephone but not hear a television show or movie (I cannot go to the movie theatre without captions on the screen). People assume that I can hear pretty well in social settings because they may see me talking on a telephone which is something that does not require lip-reading. Instead, I hear worse in social settings because there is less of a concentration of the sound directly to my ear whereas a phone has direct sound to my ear. This is just one example of the misunderstandings that can occur in a day that people assume about my hearing loss.
So yes, I think it could be a little bit about a lack of knoweldge of the levels of hearing loss that exist but it could also be just a lack of people that are known to have a hearing loss? Do people who lose a lot of hearing in their older age feel too embarrassed in the culture to ask for help or assistance to hear better? Does this affect how society views people who have disabilities like this?
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