Join us today and every day to raise awareness about hearing health and support those with hearing loss.

Did You Know?

• Hearing loss is twice as common as diabetes or cancer.
• 80% of hearing loss can be treated with hearing aids, but only 1 in 4 people use them.
• Untreated hearing loss increases the risk of cognitive decline (5x), depression (18% vs. 8%), and falls (3x higher risk).
• 28% of adults over 52 with hearing loss struggle with daily activities, compared to 7.3% with normal hearing.
• 1 in 8 people in the U.S. (ages 12+) experience hearing loss.
• Hearing loss is linked to lower salaries (up to $30,000 less) and higher unemployment rates (44% vs. 27%).

Let’s break the stigma and support better hearing for all.


Credit:  Maryland Department of Disabilities 

National Deaf History Month 2023

Have you met Ally?  Sign up for a proper introduction with Instructional Technology's training here:  https://my3.my.umbc.edu/groups/instructional-technology/events/79747

When:  February 12th at noon

Where: Online - from the comfort of where you access Blackboard!

From Instructional Technology on the what-to-do:

Come to this webinar and learn about Ally and what it can do to help you remediate course materials to improve accessibility for all. This orientation will showcase Ally’s powerful file conversion tools that provide alternative formats and expand students' options about how they want to engage with content.

This session will also help you move beyond content remediation into a more proactive approach, one where you find or create more accessible course materials from day one.

Finally, we will review strategies on how to create accessible content, including tools to help with Word documents, PDFs, PowerPoint, lecture videos, and images.

Workshop Objectives

Upon completion of the workshop, participants should be able to:

• Review key barriers that hinder the accessibility of content.
• Interpret Ally indicators and reports to effectively remediate course materials. 
• Review Ally's alternative formats available to students.
• Identify accessibility tools that help you create accessible content. 
• Create a basic strategy to address content accessibility in your course, including which tools you plan to use.

The webinar will take place in a Blackboard Collaborate virtual conference room. Use the link below to enter the webinar up to 15 minutes before the start time:

For more information about Ally at UMBC, please see this announcement and the FAQ collection.

Live presentations can be thought-provoking, inspirational, and powerful. A great presentation can inspire us to think about something in an entirely different way or bring a group together around a common idea or project. But not everyone experiences presentations in the same way. We may speak a different language from the presenter, or be a native speaker in another language, and some of us are deaf and hard of hearing. So, what if speakers could make their presentations better understood by everyone in the room? Now they can with live captions & subtitles in PowerPoint.

In honor of the U.N. International Day of Persons with Disabilities, Microsoft announced this new feature—powered by artificial intelligence (AI)—which provides captions and subtitles for presentations in real-time.

Read more about it, and view a short demo here.