Advocacy – Delaware Association of the Deaf (DAD)

January 27, 2025

The City of Rehoboth is seeking public input for individuals with disabilities

3 comment boxes appear on the left side with words - Reach Out Rehoboth

REHOBOTH BEACH, Del. – The City of Rehoboth Beach seeks public comment for its ADA transition plan.

The city invites organizations, stakeholders, and residents to share their concerns and suggestions about pedestrian accessibility. The construction firm JMT is set to complete the self-assessment.

Rehoboth Beach Assistant City Manager Evan Miller believes this will positively affect the area.

“It’s important to ensure that everything we offer is accessible to individuals with disabilities. It’s important because it’s not just identifying potential physical barriers, but also other barriers.”

Public comment through Reach Out Rehoboth is open through February 28.

To comment, click here.

Source: https://www.wmdt.com/2025/01/the-city-of-rehoboth-is-seeking-public-input-for-individuals-with-disabilities/ (This news was relayed to us from ODHH originally.)

January 22, 2025

Early Treatment for Hearing Loss in Infants is Critical—But Access to Care is Not Always Equal

About one in every 500 infants is identified as deaf or hard of hearing. When left undetected, hearing loss can result in delays in speech and language, as well as social and emotional development. Early detection and treatment can help avoid this. But not all children have the same access to testing and intervention.

Today’s WatchBlog post looks at our new report on a national program for early detection of hearing loss in infants and children, and issues with accessing that care. The video below translates our report findings into American Sign Language (ASL). A longer video at the bottom of this post shares an ASL translation of the report’s full highlights.

Read on at https://www.gao.gov/blog/early-treatment-hearing-loss-infants-critical-access-care-not-always-equal.

Note: ASL summaries videos also available at their website explaining the report. More detail is through another link via ‘our new report’ link above.

January 17, 2025

NAD Open Letter to Charlie Kirk

Background:

In one of his podcasts, internet personality Charlie Kirk stated:

(You can see the original video clip here:)

https://www.mediamatters.org/media/4026530/embed/embed

Transcript:
CHARLIE KIRK (HOST): I’m gonna say this just off the cuff before I introduce our guest. Can we please just go away with half the screen during these emergency briefings to the sign language interpreters? I have nothing against, obviously, people that cannot hear, but there’s closed captioning. I mean, this is just over the top. We can’t do this. We gotta get back to how it used to be. It’s just, oh, it’s just too much. It’s a distraction is what it is. The reason is they do these emergency briefings for fires or terrorist attacks, and you’re looking at this and you’re not listening. I don’t like it. So we got — we just gotta — closed captioning’s perfectly fine. I think we have to — we gotta get back to basics here.

See NAD’s response at https://www.nad.org/2025/01/10/nad-open-letter-to-charlie-kirk/

DAD Note: DAD supports equal access to critical emergency information at all times including the presence of a sign language interpreter. Time is of importance and good communication is essential.