Emma Nicholson (now a LibDem peer) only really displays her profound deafness by her speech. She campaigned way before the Iraq war for one of the minorities there (late at night and it was either the Kurds or the Marsh Arabs)
Jack Straw is also very deaf and the media almost never mention that the reason he asks Muslim women to remove a full face veil is so that he can lip read.
It frustrates me hugely when someone say "oh yes. We have a loop system" and I turn up to a meeting or conference and it turns out to be completely inappropriate for the event and is useless. But because they don't understand what a loop system/IR system is, and very often they have been badly advised, they buy some cr*ppy little thing and think they are DDA compliant. If it were matter of course for venues to be adapted properly it wouldn't be such an issue for people to ask for the loop to be switched on or for an IR headset to be provided.
I've just had an IR system delivered to me for use at work, training and conferences that I organise through my job and I took it to a public meeting last night, set it up and found out that there were two other people with hearing aids and a couple more who used the ear phone headset because they had hearing loss but didn't wear an aid. Everybody was fascinated by the system and were all willing to pass the mic around and make the meeting accessible. Without that, all those people would have struggled to take part. Ad astra per aspera
