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BE AN ADVOCATE Acoustics To be an effective force for Advocacy, we need far larger numbers of SHHH members. At present we have 1150 California members; but we need far more. We would like every SHHH member to bring in one other member. Please give a gift of a membership to a friend or ask someone to join. Here are some things hard of hearing people need to advocate for. Some we are working on right now--Hearing Aid Insurance, Health Access to Kaiser Permanente, and new in 2003, Audiologists/Hearing Aid Dispensers to give a membership in SHHH to each hearing aid buyer. If any of the following ideas interest you, please advocate for them. We need all the advocates we can get. Acoustics Now we need ANSI standards developed for all buildings. The Transportation Barriers Compliance Board (Access Board) is an independent federal agency whose primary mission is accessibility for people with disabilities. See www.access-board.gov. Audiologists/Hearing Aid
Dispensers to give each hearing aid buyer a $25 membership in
SHHH. Captioned Movies Captioned Videos SB 842, introduced by Senator Betty Karnette, D-Long Beach, asking that Universal Design be applied to all instructional materials, is now law. Section 60061.8 (a)(2), added to the Education Code, states: After January 1, 2005, all video products designed for pupils in kindergarten and grades 1 to 12 inclusive, shall be closed-captioned. Dictionary Definitions of Deaf and
Hard of hearing Digital Phone Compatibility Hearing Aid Insurance In 2002, California Senator Jack Scott introduced SB
1638, proposing coverage of $1500 per year for children
under age 18. This bill died. In 2003 California Senator Jack
Scott again introduced a bill, SB 174, proposing
coverage of $1000 per year for children under age 18. Kaiser Permanente Health Access Statistic. One fifth of the population of California belongs to Kaiser Permanente (KP) HMO. KP has over 6 million members in California. A brief sequence of events is as follows: In 2000-2001, Disability Rights Advocates, brought a class-action lawsuit against Kaiser Permanente on behalf of all its California members with disabilities, saying that their facilities and programs were inaccessible to disabled people. Instead of fighting it, Kaiser Permanente agreed in 2001 to revamp all its California health centers and policies to meet the needs of people with vision, hearing, cognitive, speech and mobility disabilities and has chosen its hospitals in Riverside and San Francisco as models where the new policies will be worked out. See the Terms of the Settlement. Live Theatre Loop California for Permanent accessibility Medicare Reimbursement Teacher Credentialing – Auditory-Oral
Methods In 2003, a private university, National University in San Diego, has begun to fill this need by opening a Center for Hard of Hearing or Deaf Persons, committed to training teachers in Auditory-Oral methods of language acquisition. See www.nu.edu/conted. Read The SHHH Californian, Summer 2003, Pages 1 & 2, to see what is happening. Visibility in the Language AGBell Association for the Deaf, is now AGBell Association
for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing (1999).
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