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Considerations for testing deaf and hard of hearing candidates include test construction and testing accommodations. The topic of technology and access will also be addressed. Many deaf and hard of hearing individuals experience difficulty with standardized tests, such as college and graduate school admissions tests and professional licensing and certification tests. At the heart of this difficulty is the reality that often English functions as a nonnative language within this population. Because English is auditorially based, deaf and hard of hearing individuals do not have full access to it across situations. It is important to note that the question of English access may be equally true for deaf and hard of hearing individuials who have grown up using American Sign Language as for those who have not.

Test Construction: Test items may be problematic for deaf and hard of hearing candidates in any one of the following ways, or some combination thereof:

• The overall style of language used in of testing is very specialized. Compared with the general test-taking population, both hearing nonnative speakers of English and deaf and hard of hearing test-takers may find these atypical or specialized uses of the language more challenging. Often deaf and hard of hearing persons who do not have difficulty reading and understanding other written material, including course textbooks, magazines, newspapers, or adult-level fiction, are stymied by the items on standardized tests.
• The problem may be the use of vocabulary that is not often used in everyday conversation or written material. Note that we are not talking about discipline specific or specialized vocabulary. Rather, this concern relates more to the choice of a low-frequency meaning of a word that has multiple meanings, some of which occur with higher frequency in English and are more familiar to deaf, hard of hearing, and nonnative users of English.
• Sometimes test developers chose grammatical constructions that make the item more difficult to decode, or contain extremely long sentences with multiple embedded subordinate clauses to conserve space and/or time. Long and complex sentences may make an otherwise easy item more difficult, because the English must be decoded before the content can be processed. For someone who does not have native competence in English, this strategy may pose an unmanageable and unfair processing and memory load.
• Some item constructions are difficult and confusing for all candidates, but may present an unfair additional challenge to nonnative users of English and deaf and hard of hearing candidates. For example:
  • Which of the following is not a reason to promote an employee? [At the very least, the word "not" should be underlined.]
  • Items which give four or five statements and then ask which are true (e.g. A only, A, B, C, B only, C only, B and C only, All of the above, None of the above, etc.)

Testing Accommodations: When a test is administered, changes may be made to the testing environment, the administration procedures, or the test itself (perhaps more accurately called "test adaptations"). Possible accommodations include:

• Extra time: For some deaf and hard of hearing candidates, extra time may address the processing load described earlier, create a more level playing field, and may help improve performance.
• Interpreter for directions only: Provides access to directions which are read-aloud, or announcements (e.g. "You have five minutes to complete Section A), and other non-test information (e.g. comments made by a test proctor in response to candidate questions about procedures)
• Interpreted test content: Test questions and answer choices are interpreted. There has been very limited use of this accommodation, and very little research done. However, research done on translation of tests from one language to another suggests that this could relate in changes to item difficulty (i.e. signed items might become easier OR more difficult than their English originals). There are other challenges to the efficacy of this accommodation. Interpreter knowledge of the content or intent of the item may vary. An interpreter's skill level or competence in both English and ASL may affect how the information is rendered. Finally, unless an interpreter is following a scripted translation, the rendering of the test material will vary from administration to administration. There is no way to know in advance whether, or to what extent this will naturally occur or what effect, if any, the variability in translation may have on a candidate's test performance.
• Alternate test forms: Sometimes a testing company may elect to create an alternate form which, for example, removes music or phonics items from a test that is really testing content OTHER than music or phonics. A statistical formula can be applied to render such altered forms valid. Another type of alternative form, might be a translated test form. For example, a listening test may be translated to ASL and presented on videotape. This has been done in the context of research projects a few times, with mixed results, due to challenges intrinsic to the translation process, as described earlier for interpreting tests.

Technology: Increasingly, tests are developed for computer administration. Undoubtedly, computer technology and the Internet have leveled the playing field for deaf and hard of hearing individuals in many ways. However, computer administered tests do NOT eliminate the language and item construction concerns described earlier. Some such tests also do not permit the candidate to move past a challenging item to complete other items and then return to it later. For a nonnative user of English or a deaf or hard of hearing candidate, this may eliminate a very effective test-taking strategy, putting them at an increased disadvantage compared with hearing, native speakers. Consequently, test development efforts must consider the needs of deaf and hard of hearing, and nonnative English speakers, at the test development stage, not "after the fact."