Sign Languages Commons^™

Deaf Accessibility In The Christian Church, Madison Finley

Honors Projects

Around the globe, only two percent of Deaf people have had the opportunity to be introduced to the Gospel. Religious accessibility is limited for individuals who are deaf or hard-of-hearing. This paper begins to investigate:

• How can Christian churches increase accessibility to religion, worship, and other programs for Deaf individuals?

My Honors Project activity is preparing research and materials for a physical guide booklet for Christian churches that do not currently offer any Deaf ministries or American Sign Language interpretation or that may be seeking to increase accessibility for Deaf individuals. The primary purpose of this project is to create …

Starved For Knowledge: The Effect Of Language Deprivation And “Mainstream” Education On Deaf Accessibility To The United States Education System, Katherine Arpino

Honors Scholar Theses

The prevalence of language deprivation in deaf and hard of hearing youth makes the United States public education system fundamentally inaccessible to that portion of the population. Previous research has demonstrated that depriving prelingually deaf children of an accessible, visual language during the critical language acquisition period has long-term effects on their reading comprehension, mental health, social development, and cognitive development (Friedman and Rusoe, 2015; Hall et al., 2019; Cheng et al., 2019; Hall, 2017). Furthermore, the lack of bilingual-bimodal education (or purely signed education) in the United States public education system sets deaf children up for failure, as they …