Concerns of Indian Mothers with Children Having Severe-to-Profound Hearing Impairment at Diagnosis and after 1–3 Years of Therapy

Counseling training in graduate programs continues to be underrepresented. If parental queries are not addressed adequately, they keep visiting one doctor after another. Objective. The aim of the study is to identify maternal needs of children with hearing impairment at two stages of habilitation, that is, just after diagnosis (group I) and after receiving 1 to 3 years of language therapy (group II). Methods. Two groups of mothers were asked to speak their queries about aural habilitation of their children. Queries were recorded, summarized, and categorized as per their priorities. Results. Group I mothers wanted to know about how the child would learn to listen and speak (45%), causes of hearing loss (33.7%), understanding the ear and hearing (10.2%), understanding the audiogram (7%), and coping with emotional aspects of hearing loss (5%), while group II parents had priorities concerning speech development (24.5%) followed by child independence and employment (17.3%), schooling (15.6%), problem behaviors (11%), amplification device (9.4%), duration of therapy (8%), future of the child (8%), and questions about how can my child get adjusted to the “normal” world (6%). Conclusions. Culture- and language-specific materials to explain these issues need to be developed

A Survey on Conceptions of Stuttering

The conceptions about stuttering vary amongst cultures. Culturally specific findings regarding stuttering help in understanding the peoples' views and conceptions about stuttering and devising awareness and counselling strategies. A total of 132 passengers on the Coromandal Express from Chennai to Howrah participated in this study. All of them belonged to the upper middle socio-economic class. Preliminary Stuttering Conception Questionnaire (PSCQ) was used to understand their conceptions of stuttering. 23% had no idea and 12% had myths about the etiology of stuttering. 11% assumed it was a genetic problem and 5—6% a physical-mental problem. 31% had no idea of treatment options. 25% preferred medicine, 23% rehabilitation for treatment of stuttering. For rehabilitation, only 45% precisely knew about the speech language pathologist; the remaining 55% were unaware of this profession. Steps need to be taken towards educating the common man about stuttering

ACCESSIBILITY OF INTERNATIONAL WEBPAGES:A PRELIMINARY SURVEY

The paper surveys the extent to which the international webpage’s applied accessibility statements. Methodology includes thirty one international websites have been evaluated for 17 accessibility features prescribed in the accessibility statement by the Directorate of Standardization testing and quality certification (STQC) along with five accessibility features prescribed byWeb content accessibility guidelines (WCAG).The average score obtained was seven. Top scorers were the Ministry of Road and Transport (21), National institute for Empowerment of Person with Multiple Disabilities (16) and Yahoo webpage (12) Bottom scorers were Wikipedia (7), American Speech and Hearing Association (8), Meccawebpage (8) Massachusetts university (6) and International telecommunication union, toolkit for Disables (6).The features which are significantly applied (p<0.05) are Headings, Subheadings, Titles, Tooltip, Connection with social networking and Videos. The feature which were not significantly used by the websites are Skip to main content, icons, Accessibility features, Adjust contrast scheme and Increase text spacing other Twelve features were used in consistently. Hence the accessibility statements which enable merging the digital divide are yet to be appreciated internationally