Impact of severe weather warnings on the hearing impaired

The authors surveyed over 200 hearing-impaired residents of Oklahoma and Minnesota that have tremendous difficulty in receiving severe weather information during severe weather situations. Owing to their inability to hear, they cannot hear warning sirens, cannot receive weather warnings from radio, and have difficulty in picking up weather information from television. Survey topics included methods of receiving severe weather warnings, television closed-captioning of hazardous weather broadcasts, preferences in receiving severe weather warnings, and other pertinent topics. Survey results show that two problems that deaf and hard-of-hearing persons have in receiving severe weather information during severe weather situations are: (a) a television weather "crawl" - text that scrolls horizontally across the bottom part of a television screen being used for emergency notification - is obscured by closed captioning of a regular programming, and (b) no real-time captioning of either hazardous weather segments during regularly scheduled news broadcasts or special reports involving severe weather. These problems lead the majority of deaf and hard-of-hearing persons to rely on looking out the window in times of severe weather or become entirely dependent on their families/relatives/friends with normal hearing. This creates an extra link to get the severe weather warning information to deaf and hard-of-hearing persons that adds extra time before action is taken. The survey further indicates that the majority of deaf and hard-of-hearing persons put the responsibility of the severe weather warning shortcomings directly on local television stations that failed to display real-time captioning of hazardous weather broadcasts. Finally, the survey shows that the hearing impaired's first and second preferences in receiving weather warnings, respectively, are to have all weather broadcasts captioned in real time, and to have the weather crawls moved to the top part of the television screen so that they are not obscured by program captioning for their personal safety reasons.