Hearing handicap, in any moment of someone’s life, results in communication difficulties that can vary in amount and quality of the sounds. This study had the objective of identifing the hearing loss in students attending to the program of the Open University to the Elderly, provided to the Bauru community by the Sacred Heart University (USC), and assessing the self-perception of the non-hearing influences by the “Hearing Handicap Inventory for the Elderly-Screening” questionnaire HHIE-S (Wieselberg, 1997), created by the hearing loss of these people, comparing the results with the auditory find. Forty-seven individuals were subjected to auditory anamnesis, auditory assessment and self-perception assessment by the HHIE-S questionnaire. By this study, it was possible to identify diferent kinds and levels of the hearing loss in twenty-nine individuals. However, only ten individuals showed handicap perception.

KEY WORDS: elderly; hearing loss; presbiacusy