KARACHI, March 8: Speakers at a seminar on Saturday demanded that handicapped people in general and deaf persons in particular be given their due rights including proper opportunities to quality education and employment.

They were speaking at the inauguration of a two-day national seminar to develop signs for environmental terms in urdu, organized jointly by the Pakistan Association of the Deaf, the Sustainable Development Networking Programme and the IUCN.

They said that the sign language should be recognized as the basic language for the deaf people, and that the rights that the deaf people were enjoying in many civilized countries be given to them here as well.

They said that though the government had announced many a times that a quota of 2 per cent had been fixed for the handicapped people in employment, it was not implemented properly and disabled people were still not getting their due rights.

They said a large number of children with impaired hearing were born to normal parents and the majority of children reached the age of two years before their loss was detected

They said that while normal children effortlessly absorbed the family’s language through day to day routine and interactions, a deaf child was denied the ability.

They said that owing to lack of professional guidance parents here faced a dilemma in making the choices for various communication options such as oral, auditory-verbal, cued speech, sign language and total communications.

They said that it had been observed that when parents themselves were deaf, they were able to make a correct choice due to their own experience, and sometimes, because the sign language was already established in homes, the baby began acquiring the language skills very early.

They said a complete data for deaf children was not available and there were very few schools for them where the majority of teachers did not have expertise in their field.

Shedding light on the objective of the seminar, they said they were trying to standardize the language and environmental terms which would later be made available on CDs.

Some 50 sign language experts from all over the country — Larkana, Karachi, Sukkur, Sargodha, Hasilpur, Lahore, Rawalpindi, Pind Dadankhan, Bahalwalpur, etc — are participating at the workshop being facilitated by Irfan Mumtaz, Shirin Aziz Dossani, Shela Ali.

Laila Dossa, Muneeb Mansoor, Shirin Aziz Dossani, and others also spoke on the occasion.