The starting point of this presentation is to emphasize the absence of sensory disabled people in quantitative surveys, among which the European Social Survey which will be used as an example. We will focus our examples on the case of the Deaf in the Belgium ESS round 6.

Sensory disabled people represent a rather big population (around 4% of Belgian population) but they are nearly absent in general quantitative surveys. The aim of this paper is to present and discuss some mixed-mode techniques to reach sensory disabled people and try to include them in general opinion surveys.

Because every deaf cannot read texts, we couldn't opt for a "classic" web based questionnaire, so an adapted version of the questionnaire has been set up. It is a web-based version that integrated videos of the translation of every question in sign language.

We will show some results of the round 6 experiments that we did and show how our specific mixed-mode adapted procedures tend to prove that, with reasonable costs, it is possible to include deaf people in the general quantitative surveys and to reduce one of the specific non-response bias. The ethical issue is also at the center of our concern and the proposed techniques should contribute to a fairer use of the quantitative surveys and of inference.
We will also focus on the translation procedures (from French into Sign Language) and on the associated risk of measurement error.