A Survey on Communication Gap between Hearing and Speech Impaired Persons and Normal Persons

Abstract

-One of the major shortcomings of society is the social barrier that is created between disabled or handicapped persons and persons who are blessed with all their human faculties in order. Communication, which is the basis of human progress, often tends to be an obstacle for those unfortunate people who are unable to articulate their thoughts. This paper illustrates the lack of proper means to overcome this communication barrier, which has led to social inequality resulting in day to day problems for deaf and mute persons to converse with normal people. The root cause of this gap is that while deaf and mute persons use sign language to communicate among themselves, normal people are either reluctant to learn it or are unable to comprehend the same. Further, the former rely on lip reading to comprehend what their counterparts have said. Consequently, in a conversation between a hearing and speech impaired person and a normal person the ease of communication and hence the comfort level is hampered. In this survey, we present research, statistics and development trends on the aforementioned subject. We provide a comparison of existing applications and research efforts to bridge the communication gap between hearing and speech impaired persons and normal persons. This survey also reports statistics on hearing and speech impaired persons in India and emphasizes the need of an effective, efficient and portable solution that can overcome the communication problem for hearing and speech impaired persons.