The Deaf Community's Experiences Navigating COVID-19 Pandemic Information

How Did Governments Address the Needs of People With Disabilities During the COVID-19 Pandemic? An Analysis of 14 Countries' Policies Based on the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons With Disabilities

BACKGROUND

People with disabilities have experienced heightened social risks in the context of the pandemic, resulting in higher rates of infection and mortality. They have also borne elevated burdens associated with public health measures. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD) obliges its 184 state parties to eliminate discrimination and ensure equality and inclusion for persons with disabilities, including protection and safety in situations of emergency. It remains unclear to what extent national COVID-19 policies have aligned with these commitments under the UNCRPD. Our objective in this exploratory study was to assess alignment between the UNCRPD indicators and COVID-19 policies from 14 countries with the goal of informing policy development that is inclusive of persons with disabilities and responsive to rights under the UNCRPD.

METHODS

We identified COVID-19 policy documents from 14 purposively selected countries. Country selection considered diversity based on geographic regions and national income levels, with restriction to those countries that had ratified the UNCRPD and had English or French as an official language. We used a computational text mining approach and developed a complex multilevel dictionary or categorization model based on the UNCRPD Bridging the Gap indicators proposed by the Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights (OHCHR). This dictionary was used to assess the extent to which indicators across the entirety of the UNCRPD were represented in the selected policies. We analyzed frequency of associations with UNCRPD, as well as conducting 'key word in context' analyses to identify themes.

RESULTS

We identified 764 COVID-19 national policy documents from the period of January 2020 to June 2021. When analyzed in relation to the Articles of the UNCRPD, the most frequently identified were Articles 11 (risk and humanitarian emergencies), 23 (home and family), 24 (education), and 19 (community living). Six countries produced 27 policies that were specifically focused on disability. Common themes within these documents included continuation of services, intersectionality and equity, and disability considerations in regulations and public health measures.

CONCLUSION

Analyzing country policies in light of the UNCRPD offers important insights about how these policies do and do not align with states' commitments. As new policies are developed and existing ones revised, more comprehensive approaches to addressing the rights of persons with disabilities are urgently needed.

Oppression by omission: An analysis of the #WhereIsTheInterpreter hashtag campaign around COVID-19 on Twitter

Critical to managing a crisis such as COVID-19 is the propagation of information to all vulnerable populations. Despite guidelines regarding communicating with people with differing accessibility needs during crises, some often find their needs unmet. Following a lack of assisted communications for d/Deaf people during the COVID-19 pandemic, a Twitter hashtag campaign, #WhereIsTheInterpreter, was launched in the UK, protesting the lack of accessibility during official press briefings around the epidemic. The campaign received support from across the globe. This study analyzes the discourse around the campaign in tweets published from March 1st, 2020 and September 30th, 2021 (N = 27,021) and analyzed the corpus using the Analysis of Topic Model Network (ANTMN) approach. We identified four major themes of discourse: discrimination, accessibility challenges, communication gaps and barriers, and Deaf rights. We analyze the discourse through the perspective of Critical Disability Theory (CDT) and hashtag activism, and discuss practical and theoretical implications.

Health Literacy and Difficulty Accessing Information About the COVID-19 Pandemic Among Parents Who Are Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing

People who are deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) struggle with information marginalization and limited health literacy, challenging their ability to access information on preventing coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). This study assessed the relationship between language preference, health literacy, and COVID-19 information barriers among parents who are DHH in the United States. Data were drawn from a larger study focused on individuals who are DHH who had given birth in the past 10 years. Respondents completed a web-based survey between March 2020 and July 2021. We segmented respondents by language preference [i.e., American Sign Language (ASL), English, or bilingual ASL/English] and used logistic regression models to test the hypothesis that language preference and health literacy were both associated with COVID-19 information marginalization. Of the total sample (N = 417), approximately 17% had limited health literacy, and 22% reported experiencing difficulty accessing information about COVID-19. In adjusted analyses, respondents with limited health literacy ([adjusted odds ratio] aOR = 2.245) and Hispanic ethnicity (aOR = 2.149) had higher risk of reporting information access barriers. There was no association between language preference and reporting COVID-19 information barriers. However, individuals who are DHH with limited health literacy were at higher risk of experiencing information marginalization during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, highlighting the need for tailored information based on access needs. [HLRP: Health Literacy Research and Practice. 2022;6(4):e310-e315.].

COVID-19 Information-Seeking, Health Literacy, and Worry and Anxiety During the Early Stage of the Pandemic in Switzerland: A Cross-Sectional Study

Objectives: To describe COVID-19 information-seeking behavior (CISB) during the first stage of the pandemic in Switzerland and identify its determinants.

Methods: We conducted an online cross-sectional survey (4 May to 6 July 2020). Participants self-reported their CISB (information sources and frequency), personal COVID-19 situation (e.g., perception about having had COVID-19), sociodemographic information, and completed validated measures of health literacy, and worry and anxiety. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics and logistic regressions.

Results: We included 1,505 participants (24.7% male; mean age = 43.0 years, SD = 13.9). Most participants reported searching for information daily (n = 1,023, 68.0%) and referring to multiple information sources (mean 3.7, SD = 1.5). Commonly used sources were official websites (n = 1,129, 75.0%) and newspapers (n = 997, 66.2%). Participants with higher health literacy were more likely to seek information daily and use online resources, but less likely to use personal networks than those with lower health literacy. We did not find any association between CISB and worry and anxiety.

Conclusion: More opportunities for personal dialogue and education about reliable online information resources should be encouraged to optimize the CISB of groups with lower health literacy.

If online learning works for you, what about deaf students? Emerging challenges of online learning for deaf and hearing-impaired students during COVID-19: a literature review

With the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak, educational systems worldwide were abruptly affected and hampered, causing nearly total suspension of all in-person activities in schools, colleges, and universities. Government officials prohibited the physical gatherings in educational institutions to reduce the spread of the virus. Therefore, educational institutions have aggressively shifted to alternative learning methods and strategies such as online-based platforms-to seemingly avoid the disruption of education. However, the switch from the face-to-face setting to an entirely online setting introduced a series of challenges, especially for the deaf or hard-of-hearing students. Various recent studies have revealed the underlying infrastructure used by academic institutions may not be suitable for students with hearing impairments. The goal of this study is to perform a literature review of these studies and extract the pressing challenges that deaf and hard-of-hearing students have been facing since their transition to the online setting. We conducted a systematic literature review of 34 articles that were carefully collected, retrieved, and rigorously categorized from various scholarly databases. The articles, included in this study, focused primarily on highlighting high-demanding issues that deaf students experienced in higher education during the pandemic. This study contributes to the research literature by providing a detailed analysis of technological challenges hindering the learning experience of deaf students. Furthermore, the study extracts takeaways and proposed solutions, from the literature, for researchers, education specialists, and higher education authorities to adopt. This work calls for investigating broader and yet more effective teaching and learning strategies for deaf and hard-of-hearing students so that they can benefit from a better online learning experience.

Global Experiences of Community Responses to COVID-19: A Systematic Literature Review

Objective

This study aimed to conduct a systematic review of the global experiences of community responses to the COVID-19 epidemic.

Method

Five electronic databases (PubMed, Embase, CINAHL, ScienceDirect, and Web of Science) were searched for peer-reviewed articles published in English, from inception to October 10, 2021. Two reviewers independently reviewed titles, abstracts, and full texts. A systematic review (with a scientific strategy for literature search and selection in the electronic databases applied to data collection) was used to investigate the experiences of community responses to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Results

This review reported that community responses to COVID-19 consisted mainly of five ways. On the one hand, community-based screening and testing for Coronavirus was performed; on the other hand, the possible sources of transmission in communities were identified and cut off. In addition, communities provided medical aid for patients with mild cases of COVID-19. Moreover, social support for community residents, including material and psychosocial support, was provided to balance epidemic control and prevention and its impact on residents' lives. Last and most importantly, special care was provided to vulnerable residents during the epidemic.

Conclusion

This study systematically reviewed how communities to respond to COVID-19. The findings presented some practical and useful tips for communities still overwhelmed by COVID-19 to deal with the epidemic. Also, some community-based practices reported in this review could provide valuable experiences for community responses to future epidemics.

How sign language expertise can influence the effects of face masks on non-linguistic characteristics

Face masks occlude parts of the face which hinders social communication and emotion recognition. Since sign language users are known to process facial information not only perceptually but also linguistically, examining face processing in deaf signers may reveal how linguistic aspects add to perceptual information. In general, signers could be born deaf or acquire hearing loss later in life. For this study, we focused on signers who were born deaf. Specifically, we analyzed data from a sample of 59 signers who were born deaf and investigated the impacts of face masks on non-linguistic characteristics of the face. Signers rated still-image faces with and without face masks for the following characteristics: arousal and valence of three facial expressions (happy, neutral, sad), invariant characteristics (DV:sex, age), and trait-like characteristics (attractiveness, trustworthiness, approachability). Results indicated that, when compared to masked faces, signers rated no-masked faces with stronger valence intensity across all expressions. Masked faces also appeared older, albeit a tendency to look more approachable. This experiment was a repeat of a previous study conducted on hearing participants, and a post hoc comparison was performed to assess rating differences between signers and hearing people. From this comparison, signers exhibited a larger tendency to rate facial expressions more intensely than hearing people. This suggests that deaf people perceive more intense information from facial expressions and face masks are more inhibiting for deaf people than hearing people. We speculate that deaf people found face masks more approachable due to societal norms when interacting with people wearing masks. Other factors like age and face database’s legitimacy are discussed.