Low-incidence disabilities occur relatively infrequently in the general population. Low-incidence disabilities usually refer to visual impairments, hearing impairments, or deaf-blindness.
Visual Impairments:
One in 200 children ages 6 to 21 receive services for visual impairments. All have individual characteristics and differ in abilities: developmental rate, and social skills. One commonality is that they al have less than functional vision which interferes with access to the general education.
· Congenial: means vision loss before or at birth.
· Adventitious: loss of vision usually by the result of diseases or accident.
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Some individuals may have visual impairments so severe that they may require text-to-speech devices. Individuals with visual impairments are able to take printed text documents and place them on the scanner. The documents are then translated into speech, Braille or simply held as a text document which can be adjusted, saved, edited and printed out. The device starts talking automatically as soon as the page scan is complete. Cicero-Text-Reader is fast, accurate, and easy to use and includes context sensitive help.
Hearing Impairments:
The educational definition for hearing impairment is one that the hearing loss adversely affects an educational performance. Deaf refers to those students who have a hearing impairment so severe that they are unable to understand speech even with amplification. Hard of hearing refers to those students who have hearing impairments that affect the educational performance but allow some linguistic information to be processed aurally, with or without amplification
- Unilateral hearing loss: Hearing loss in one ear.
- Bilateral hearing loss: Hearing loss in both ears.
- Prelingual deafness: hearing loss occurring before language develops, do not develop speech language.
Hearing aids: The purpose of hearing aids is to pick up sounds, amplify them and deliever the sounds to the middle ear. The sound may be amplified but is not always clearer. Hearing aids are only effective if the students can actually hear and understand the spoken language.
Any device must meet the needs of the student. The student is an individual and has indvidual needs.
To assist students with sensory needs accomodations may need to be made such as: seating placement, modifications to the classroom, and accomodations and modifications to instructional material.