Flattening World for Deaf / Hard of Hearing Consumers and Professionals

I created a white-paper and a PowerPoint presentation about the "Flattening World for Deaf / HOH Consumers and Professionals", which discusses the how the latest technologies and services have helped level the playing field for deaf/hoh consumers and professionals in recent years.

Also discussed, is why corporations should pay attention to this often overlooked population segment, along with a few general tips on how they can improve their products and services to meet these consumers and working professionals.

Read the white paper and/or view the PowerPoint presentation - provide feedback, comments, share with friends, co-workers and recruiters. Hopefully this article and presentation will be a small step in the right direction to help improve consumer and employment relations for the deaf/hoh population segment.

I welcome feed back and comments to help further improve and update this white paper and/or presentation. Feel free to share

these links with others as long as you cite the source.

Estimated 278 Million Deaf/HoH Consumers WorldWide

Updated: Last Spring while conducting research for a paper for my MBA program, I came across the World Health Organization’s (WHO) web site, where a web page listed that there is an estimated 278 million deaf / hoh people around the world - thus I have updated the tag line of my blog to reflect the latest estimates. This is a 178 million increase from the previous estimate of 100 million worldwide that was mentioned else where.

Yet, for a large number of them, they reside in low-to middle income population zones, where access to technology goods such as computers and the Internet may be extremely limited.

WHO estimates that the number of deaf/hoh consumers is expected to increase due to increasingly aging population segments - everyone naturally loses their hearing as they age, regardless of ethnicity. The bottom line is that companies should pay attention, and produce products and services for this growing population segment.

The WHO page outlining the latest count of deaf / hoh people in the world can be viewed at: http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs300/en/