Overview

The freedom or ability to obtain or make use of something.

Someone who helps or supports someone else in regards to a common interest. Allies benefit from a connection they share.

A visual-spatial language used in the United States and Canada. The linguistic information is processed through the eyes and conveyed by the movement of the hands and non-manual signals. ASL has its own rules of grammar, phonology, morphology, semantics, syntax, and pragmatics.

Audio specialized formats render content as speech to which a person listens. Audio formats include recorded human voice and synthesized electronic speech.

Relating to the sense of hearing.

A tactile system of reading and writing made up of raised dot patterns for letters, numbers, and punctuation marks. Braille may be either embossed (a permanent printed document) or refreshable (electronically generated and accessed via a braille display device).

A cultural, linguistic term that means that a person's communication mode is visually based (either sign language or written English); residual hearing (if any) may be a secondary and supplemental sensory avenue.

Any combination of documented hearing and vision loss, ranging from mild to profound hearing loss and low vision to total blindness; students who are deafblind should be reported to the Ohio's Center for Deafblind Education (https://ohiodeafblind.com) for additional services.

The severity of hearing loss, typically divided into seven categories. The numerical values are based on the average of the hearing levels at three frequencies, 500 Hz, 1000 Hz, and 2000 Hz, in the better ear, without amplification. Some people use slightly smaller or slightly larger numbers for each of the following categories: Normal range: -10 to 15 dB, Slight loss/minimal loss: 16 to 25 dB, Mild loss: 26 to 40 dB, Moderate loss: 41 to 55 dB, Moderate/severe loss: 56 to 70 dB, Severe loss: 71 to 90 dB, Profound loss: 91 dB or more (https://www.asha.org/).

A term to describe an individual with any degree of hearing loss. Note: This term may be offensive to deaf/hard of hearing people as they consider "deaf" and "hard of hearing" to be more positive. Many prefer not to be labeled "impaired" as people.