A person who is not able to hear as well as someone with normal hearing – hearing thresholds of 20 dB or better in both ears – is said to have hearing loss. Hearing loss may be mild, moderate, severe, or profound. It can affect one ear or both ears and leads to difficulty in hearing conversational speech or loud sounds.
Hard of hearing refers to people with hearing loss ranging from mild to severe. People who are hard of hearing usually communicate through spoken language and can benefit from hearing aids, cochlear implants, and other assistive devices as well as captioning.
Deaf people mostly have profound hearing loss, which implies very little or no hearing. They often use sign language for communication. - The World Health Organization
Deaf history, the experience and education of deaf persons, and the development of deaf communities and culture through time. The history of deaf people (those affected by varying degrees of deafness) has been written as a history of hearing perceptions of deaf people, as a history of the education of deaf people, and as the history of the lives and communities of deaf people. This history embodies some of the major strands of disability studies scholarship: the reactions of outsiders to those with a physical difference, shifting understandings of normalcy, and the existence of a community of people who create lives based on a different sensory universe than that of those around them.
Deaf people are unique among individuals with a sensory difference in that they are also a linguistic minority. They have long-formed communities whenever they come together in a specific geographic location. Most scholars attribute the development of deaf communities to the establishment of schools for the deaf and the desire of alumni to associate with one another afterward. But there is also evidence that whenever a significant number of deaf people exist in one geographic location, they will form social relationships with one another and with hearing people who use sign language. The island of Martha’s Vineyard, off the Massachusetts coast in the United States, was an example of such a community. From the 17th to the mid-20th century, a significant population of deaf people coexisted alongside their hearing counterparts in certain towns on the island. In those towns, nearly everyone was able to use some form of sign language, and deafness was an accepted, unremarkable fact of daily life.
Communities such as that found on Martha’s Vineyard are likely rare. There were few if any, politically organized European communities of deaf people in the early modern era (the 16th and 17th centuries). There were, however, early small-scale attempts by European religious orders to educate the deaf children of rich noble families. Spanish Benedictine monk Pedro Ponce de León was the most prominent of those early teachers. In the 1540s he taught the deaf brothers Don Francisco de Velasco and Don Pedro de Velasco, as well as 10 to 12 other deaf people, at his monastery. Ponce’s work would be replicated in other small-scale schools throughout Europe, but state sponsorship of deaf education would begin only in the 18th century. -Britannica
Information gathered from Britannica, Better Hearing, and Deaf Unity.
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Although these factors can be encountered at different periods across the lifespan, individuals are most susceptible to their effects during critical periods in life.
Information from The World Health Organization
