September 24th – 30th is Arizona’s Deaf Awareness Week! Although Deaf Awareness Week is only seven days long, friends, families, and communities should always strive to understand and be considerate of those who are deaf or have hearing loss. In hopes to increase public awareness of deaf people and culture, we celebrate Deaf Awareness Week once a year!
Did you know?
- Between 17-18% of the population in Arizona has hearing loss.
- There is a minimum of 1,145,166 adults aged 20+ that are deaf, have hearing loss, or deaf-blind. The majority has hearing loss or is deaf (do not use ASL as their primary language). About 20,000 – 30,000 are culturally Deaf and about 400 are deaf-blind.
- In Arizona, two out of every 1,000 newborns have hearing loss. The statistic doubles by the age of 6, and by the time they are in their late teens, 20% of kids have a mild or worse hearing loss.
- In the schools K-12, there are about 1,500 students whose primary diagnosis is hearing loss, not including those who have hearing loss as a secondary diagnosis.
Source: Arizona Commission for the Deaf and the Hard of Hearing
With numbers so high, it may come as a surprise that many universities and companies are scrambling to find resources for their students or employee with hearing loss. Many companies and schools have yet to realize how prevalent hearing loss is within their communities. Caption Pros is proud to help those with hearing loss attend conferences, lectures, and meetings by providing captioning services onsite or remotely.
An offer from Caption Pros For Deaf Awareness Week
In honor of Arizona’s Deaf Awareness Week, Caption Pros is offering 2 hours of FREE captioning services to a disability-related organization that has never used captions before. Contact Jen if you’re interested!