This week (4th – 10th May) is Deaf Awareness Week, an opportunity to raise awareness of the needs of people who are deaf or living with hearing loss.
In employment, there are several considerations around deafness and hearing loss.
- Ensuring the working environment is as inclusive as possible. This includes making reasonable adjustments under the Equality Act 2010 as well as proactive measures whereby employees don’t need to ask for reasonable adjustments in the first place.
- Enabling time off for appointments to assist with hearing loss, particularly any new or early onset hearing loss as early interventions may help to preserve someone’s hearing.
- Health and Safety implications. This includes risk assessing working environments for employees who are deaf or living with hearing loss to ensure it is safe. Also, putting in place measures to reduce the risks of work-related hearing loss in certain industries, sectors, and noisy working environments.
There are already practical measures many employers take to make workplaces both accessible and safe for colleagues living with hearing loss. This is one of the areas where we’re seeing positive examples of AI deployment in areas such as transcription and translation which make a real difference both from an inclusion but also safety perspective.