49 ms·

Being deaf

• zaroth 14y ago
  This is a really hard post to try to comment on, but here's just a thought. The first thing I felt reading the story was impressed. It's a good article on HNfp. But are you asking too much out of "work"? It is great to hone a skill, apply it, create great things with it, and ultimately survive and thrive off of that skill. I think that's incredible. The internet has certainly help open more opportunities for those with disabilities. You're fighting an inspiring fight against your disability. Give your co-founder and your co-workers some major credit too. It's not every startup/founder who would make the hire.
  • sarenji 14y ago
    Thanks, this means a lot. What you say is true. I've had a hard time separating work from personal life, since this is my first job (ever!). Going forward, I have a better idea of what to expect. I also wanted to make it clear that I'm extremely thankful to my work for taking the chance to hire me. I love literally everyone here, even though, sometimes, I feel alone. Now, I'd consider all of them my friends. That's the basic sense I tried to get across with this post.
• rdl 14y ago
  "The only good access service I’ve ever gotten is Cued Speech. In a basic sense, Cued Speech is a system that uses signs for sound. It was invented to battle the spectacularly low deaf literacy rate. (The average reading level of deaf 17- and 18-year-olds is at the fourth grade level.2) " Wow. That is seriously depressing. I can't even imagine being deaf and not reading a lot. (I actually don't think my life would be seriously negatively impacted by being deaf; it would be an excuse to take meetings on IRC and via email, which would improve productivity for everyone; I already largely prefer subtitled video content. The only thing I'd really miss is listening to audiobooks while driving.) (I've known several deaf and a few blind people who are amazing software engineers; over the Internet, it's pretty hard to tell.)
  • brainless 14y ago
    You are trying to imagine something that normal humans can not easily. That is why you are probably very wrong. Do not assume your life would have been very similar if you were deaf. Remember each and every day of you life would pose more struggle, much more than you go through now.
    • deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
    • pbhjpbhj 14y ago
      There's the flip side too. The OP mentions that they largely reject Deaf culture instead identifying as deaf. Some Deaf people enjoy their lifestyle and the community and culture that surrounds them so much that they would choose for their children to be deaf so that they too can be a fully accepted (!) part of that same culture. TBH I've a lot of sympathy with that position. In short, be cautious. A sign user living amongst a deaf community might well feel offended at your pity and assumption that theirs is a lower quality of life (for some measure of quality). I think the OPs chosen field must be particularly hard - speakers have difficulty with communicating code/markup too, it requires a mix of communication media to effectively and unambiguously communicate code IMO. Transliterating code in to English can be tricky, I bet it's hard in sign too. I'm interested whether the OP uses ASL at all (or some other sign language) or only uses Cued Speech. Also whether they've attempted to educate their colleagues in Cued Speech and if that has helped at all?
  • bad_user 14y ago
    I actually don't think my life would be seriously negatively impacted by being deaf I think you should reconsider your assumptions, because with any of the 5 senses gone, your life will be seriously impacted in a negative way, even more so for eye sight and hearing. Some people can cope with such a disability, but only through tremendous effort. On deafness, that means you won't be able to participate in conversations the way normal people do, so you'll have to read lips and learn how to pronounce sounds by examining how other people move their mouth and tongue. Many people with deafness since birth can't do that, preferring instead to stay close to other people that know sign language. Imagine how life is for them when they can't communicate with most people they meet.
• citricsquid 14y ago
  The way he talks about office communication and missing out on things reminds me very much of being a remote worker, I don't think I can begin to imagine how frustrating it would be to be in the office and feel like you weren't there. A few years ago there was a wonderful post on somethingawful.com from a deaf person who answered questions and talked about his life experiences, there was hours and hours of content to read and it was really informative and interesting, unfortunately it's hidden behind the archives pay wall now.
  • jyothi 14y ago
    That is an excellent point you bring up there: remote workers are very close to being deaf. There are so many things you feel like expressing - small things not worthy of a call or an even an email - a chat works but still not the same effect. Being a remote worker is like being both deaf and dumb. I hope one day we would have the Cisco tele presence affordable in small offices too http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQpBPUbNJcM&feature=fvwrel http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQpBPUbNJcM&feature=fvwre...
    • shakesbeard 14y ago
      I don't think this is accurate. As a deaf person you see when conversations take place, and when you are excluded from them. As a remote worker you don't get this consistent reminder. You are correct, that it might be similar when trying to do small talk, though. PS: I work 100% remote.
  • liotier 14y ago
    The presence of remote workers in a team greatly enhances written communications - take most open source projects for example : for lack of frequent oral interaction they are heavy on forums, mailing lists, bug trackers, wikis etc. I guess that the presence of deaf people in a team might provide the same challenges and produce similar effects. But I'm not sure that deaf people want to be treated entirely like remote workers : as the article shows, the need for social life must be taken into account too.
  • jwingy 14y ago
• kevinchen 14y ago
  Throughout this entire post, I kept coming back to one thought: when we build things, accessibility isn't just about adding ramps for wheelchairs.
  • deleted 14y ago
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• brainless 14y ago
  I can just say: bravo. The fact that you are not only putting up a fight, but also sharing this is a sign of novelty. You are probably going to be a role model to others. Life throws challenges, those who fight, become heroes. You have certainly inspired me. Thanks
• Akejieecril 14y ago
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• mechanical_fish 14y ago
  I could try to find a deaf girl. However, I don’t want my kids to have an increased chance of deafness. This sounds like a classic case of premature optimisation. Cross that bridge when you get there. Thousands of other deaf parents have done so. Their kids were fine. Even if they come out hearing, we’d need to make sure they’re raised right — who will teach them how to talk? Let me respectfully suggest that this is just untrue, a persistent myth about language learning. Hearing kids learn spoken language just fine, even if their parents don't use it. (Parents have a natural tendency to overemphasise the percentage of the time that their kids spend listening only to them. ;) But kids listen to everyone.) One thing that does happen is that hearing kids of deaf parents become fluent in both ASL and a spoken language. Which is not a problem. It is in fact kind of awesome.
  • thunfischbrot 14y ago
    > This sounds like a classic case of premature optimisation. My thoughts exactly. Before I was forced to admit that I cuold use less technical terms when describing social or psychological phenomena ;)
  • bad_user 14y ago
    One thing that does happen is that hearing kids of deaf parents become fluent in both ASL and a spoken language This also happens inside families that migrated to another country. The parents do not speak the foreign language withing the walls of their own house (the foreign language being an inconvenience for them), but that doesn't stop the children from being very fluent in both languages from a very young age.
    • devolve 14y ago
      As a person who was raised with two different household languages at different times, I can offer anecdotal evidence that this holds true. My refugee parents decided that their native language (Romanian) would be an obstacle for me in their new country (Thailand) and went for English instead. Then we got asylum in Sweden and I learned Swedish in kindergarten and so on. In Sweden my parents started speaking Romanian at home, which I also picked up. It became a coherent triangle of languages, where home we spoke Romanian, outside of home Swedish, and English on TV and in school.
• miyudreams 14y ago
  When you work in or travel to another country speaking another language that you don't know, it feels like you are really left out. Doing anything requires more effort. You feel lost and confused. Not understanding when your coworkers speak their language eventually becomes frustrating. Of course in this case, you're out for an adventure and new learning experiences, so it's not the same as actually be physically deaf.
  • mrspeaker 14y ago
    I'm not deaf (actually, one of my ears doesn't work, but hey...) but I understand completely what this guy says about feeling like he's missing out on everything - I moved to a France to work, and my French is... poor. Everyone speaks English, but only to me. Figuring out what's going on at a high level is really difficult (me: "Where is everyone going?" them: "To the new office." me: "WTF? We have a new office?!") but worse is missing out on all the in-jokes and messin' around. I'm not saying it's the same thing as being deaf, but it turns out that stuff is pretty important.
    • phatbyte 14y ago
      You should consider doing a french language intensive course, also, try to get out of the house as much as possible and talk to people and friends. The best way to learn a new language for me it's to talk to the natives daily, even if you don't understand anything first :P. Good luck
• mudgemeister 14y ago
  At risk of committing the eternal developer fallacy of attempting to fix cultural problems with technology: is there anything we, as a hacker community, can do to help? As brother to a profoundly deaf sister (whose nerve-deafness and age make her ineligible for the cochlea implant), the most obvious opportunity is the poor accessibility of online video as you mentioned under "Screencasts, talks, and video tutorials". It seems that YouTube is making great progress in this area (c.f. http://www.youtube.com/t/captions_about http://www.youtube.com/t/captions_about and the simplicity of the transcript format at http://support.google.com/youtube/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=166810 http://support.google.com/youtube/bin/answer.py?hl=en&an...); is it just a case of contributing more transcripts and bringing this functionality to all video? I vaguely remember some other efforts in this area, it'd be great if there was some painless way to transcribe arbitrary video (such as screencasts) and be able to wrap a player with caption support.
• nadam 14y ago
  As a hacker my first thought after reading this is that how the improvement of speech recognition technology combined with something like google glasses could help deaf people.
• netvarun 14y ago
  Thanks for sharing your story! It takes true guts to write about your true feelings. off-topic: You have one of the coolest facebook usernames. Completely stumped me for a while!
  • pooriaazimi 14y ago
    > off-topic: You have one of the coolest facebook usernames. Completely stumped me for a while! Even though you warned me, I was still taken aback: http://facebook.com/about.xhtm http://facebook.com/about.xhtm
• dm8 14y ago
  Great article. OP - If it helps, I also have a minor physical disability. I can't type properly with one hand (congenital defect, although its impacting aesthetics more when compared to motor functions) yet I'm working as an engineer for few years. And now I'm part of founding team at a startup. It never acted as an impediment in my life or career. I generally don't mention about it (to anyone) because I feel I get unwanted sympathies and awkward looks. As I'm perfectly normal like otherwise. Don't worry about hearing disability. It will only affect you if only you think so. And there will be some times you'll feel lonely and depressed (like after your bowling alley incident) because you are not part of the norm. Always remember, despite all the odds you are doing amazing (compared to others). So use that as an inspiration. That said, I would like to wish your well in you career. P.S. This is the first time I'm talking about it in public forum (in my entire life). So I'm inspired from your post :-)
• Gupie 14y ago
  What is the potential for technology to help, some sort of combination of Google glasses and siri?
• lsiebert 14y ago
  ASL was my foreign language in college. I wish I remembered it better, frankly. It's definitely got to be difficult to translate technological jargon and neologisms into ASL, much less math, where your instruction is likely highly symbolic. Probably the best you would get would be to get a lot of fingerspelling if the person doesn't understand the subject... I can definitely see how Cued Speech would work better for you. Frankly real time translation into ASL has some big difficulties because of major grammatical differences, not to mention that a fast gesture can differ in meaning from a slower one. And that's assuming they were actually using ASL for the translation, instead of some sort of pidgin. Anyway I think one of the important differences between most IM/chat and and speech is that speech is spontaneous and instant because it's serial and unbuffered. I think the closest you get in chat is Google wave, where you didn't hit enter, you typed and each letter showed up on the screen. I do wonder if even bad speech recognition, if it was real time, might not help with conversations. I really wish other IM services used real time typing, instead of requiring people to hit enter or send. Also don't assume your alone. There are probably quite a few deaf hackers, and collaboration might help bring resources like subtitled or transcribed videos to light. Anyway, I appreciate the insight. Keep kicking ass.
• Swizec 14y ago
  I know I'm echoing everyone, but this story was just so profound I have nothing to say. It's very rare to wake up in the morning, go on hackernews and find something this worthy of attention. You almost made me forget to eat breakfast. Thanks for the great read and I'm glad to hear things are looking up for you. Here's to hoping three years from now look as better than today, as today does compared to three years ago :) PS: to startup founders hiring foreign workers, they feel like this too. I've seen it in the eyes of some people at some offices. Work on making everyone feel immersed in the office culture. If you think you are, work harder. PPS: to workers where foreign people are involved, it's your job to make them feel involved. I know it's easier to just do things normally. Make an effort.
• Joakal 14y ago
  I had similar issues with you, sarenji: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2111278 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2111278 (Ask HN: Deaf wannabe entrepreneur faces networking issues. How to work with it? | Hacker News) As for love, all the people I've dated were 'normal' as in, they didn't have hearing problems like I did. They didn't mind. In fact, I even met people on OkCupid despite them knowing I'm deaf. Of course, it's hard if you're a developer and they're a designer, there's no common ground unless you both want it. My advice? Keep trying so you still have as much opportunities as others.
  • Kluny 14y ago
    Reposting earlier comment to make sure you see it: Heya, I'd like to start some sort of community for those of us who are deaf and work in technology. I'm studying programming in Victoria, myself. Want to contact me, shannon at rocketships.ca, and I'll invite you to a facebook page? If you have a better idea than facebook, let me know, too.
    • Joakal 14y ago
      I don't use Facebook that much. Tried MSN? I believe I know of at least one deaf person on msn (From when I posted the earlier thread). Alternatively, IRC? There's #startup, why not #deafstartup channel?
• kentosi 14y ago
  Thanks for taking the time to share this story. I'm not deaf, but I can very much relate to some of what you've said. Especially the loneliness part. I'm an English speaker who's spent the last year in France. I'm currently working in a French company, and the spoken language is still VERY difficult to follow (ie - when they use slang, jokes, etc). For six months, I've been feeling like I'm in the shadows quietly sitting with my colleagues at lunch and hearing them laugh at jokes while I'm still trying to figure out what they were talking about with a lag of 10 seconds. It's frustrating, crushing, and you want to just go and hide somewhere. Yes I can ask them to repeat things, yes I can ask them to explain the jokes, but it just makes me feel like dead-weight that needs to be dragged along. It's frustrating beyond anything. The advantage on my part is that I can get (and have gotten) used to the language to the point that I now follow things quite well. And with time it can only improve. I'm not sure how this will pan out for you, but I wish you all the best. The fact that you're putting in the effort is in itself an awesome thing.
  • davedx 14y ago
    Same thing here, but in the Netherlands! I've noticed that I'm gradually getting better and better at understanding what people are talking about. It's a long, hard task to get to the stage where you understand the jokes and slang, but it is doable. Good luck! :-)
• ars 14y ago
  > The average reading level of deaf 17- and 18-year-olds is at the fourth grade level. Why??? I would have expected exactly the opposite. Words can open entire worlds. And today as never before a deaf person can communicate with people. The internet is text based as never before in human history. It can't be because written speech is based on oral. It's certainly possible to learn to read phonetically, but you don't have to. That's what sight words are. I read everything entirely by sight and I'm sure I'm not alone in this. So why? I would expect someone deaf to read at a blistering pace, and to type equally fast. To the point that they could communicate entirely by typing at almost the same speed as speech. What assumption am I making that is incorrect, since apparently that's not what actually happens.
  • jacobr 14y ago
    You won't get exposed to language nearly as much as a hearing person. Also, sign languages don't use regular English words, so your vocabulary will not be expanded that much in conversations.
    • jeffool 14y ago
      I won't pretend to know about literacy rates among deaf people, but I want to underline jacobr's point here: ASL is not "English with hands" any more than spoken Japanese is "English with different sounds". It's a different language, with different grammar, and different rules. Don't let the "American" throw you off. They may use familiar words and letters when writing, but you can say the same about many European languages, and as an English speaker figure out some sentences in Spanish or French. Now, you may figure out MORE in written ASL, but it's still different. Though, if I recall, ASL was based off of a French sign language. That's why adjectives go after the nouns in ASL.
      • neilk 14y ago
        Sign languages are proper languages of their own, and even if they are invented by hearing people, when a deaf community adopts the language it usually diverges quickly from the hearing culture language. So, you're right that there was a precedent to ASL that came from France but don't assume that ASL is much like French.
• jwingy 14y ago
  This may get downvoted because it may not necessarily add much to the discussion, but I just wanted to say thanks for sharing your story. Takes a lot of courage and it will undoubtedly help someone else (deaf or otherwise).
• mmagin 14y ago
  Tangentially, I was recently noticing how few people who are physically disabled I've seen in the software industry, much less people with disabilities affecting communication. Whether it's discrimination or other factors, it seems like there are likely a lot of potential workers which our society is not making good use of.
• jeffool 14y ago
  Warning: A long meandering post, about multiple things, because my day job is at a relay center, taking calls from/to deaf people. I absolutely understand his fear of letting a relay operator help him here. Now, obviously this fellow can write in English awesomely, and like any other place my coworkers are great people and (the vast majority are) trying to do their job well, so on paper you'd think it could work... But man, when it gets ugly, it gets ugly. You never realize just how much conversations change when a single "not", "un", or required inflection is left out. You know how us hearing people may misunderstand a joke or reference in text/IM? Yeah. That times twenty, because when texting/IMing, you're trying to take the medium into account. Phone conversations are so trivial to the hearing, we ramble at a million miles per hour and often don't include references to our demeanor in words or tone. It even matters what state the relay operator is working for at the time, as the laws of how the call must be handled are state laws. In Utah you must read exactly what's typed by a deaf person, even if they speak ASL, and must directly transcribe what a hearing person says, even if the deaf person doesn't speak English well. In California, where many people primarily speak ASL, you can translate from English to ASL, and ASL to English. Of course, for us hearing people it's less translation, more interpretation. One of the biggest problems I have at work? Phone lines suck. It's hard for us to hear (not to understand the deaf accent of, but literally audibly hear) so many callers, both deaf and hearing. And it's rough transcribing a voice with normal call quality and even moreso if the other connection is bad. I never realized just how bad phones sucked until I worked there. I can go home and use Google Talk on my laptop and it sounds crystal clear in comparison to any phone. Relay calls work well for saying hi to your mother and (usually) calling up your cell phone provider. You will not be explaining fizz buzz to a potential employer. I love my coworkers, but the first time you say "So you'd use a switch-case statement," they'd write "So you use which case statement q" ("Q" indicates a question,) and keep typing, because asking people to repeat themselves infuriates them, and makes them lose their concentration. And because of honest mis-hearing. You don't know the topic, so you don't know you heard it wrong, so you go on. Finally, why don't modern cell phones handle TTY calls? Turn the phone landscape, put a scrolling conversation banner at the top and the keyboard at the bottom. You'd think it'd be cake. Anyone know what the problem is there? If nothing, then someone get on that, make an app. Make yourself some money. Just credit me as an inspiration. ;)
  • 14y ago
• davedx 14y ago
  Just want to say I strongly identified with the lunchtime loneliness thing. I recently moved to the Netherlands and fortunately, I am in the position to change the fact that I can't understand what people are saying (by learning the language) - but still, I've had quite a lot of incredibly lonely lunchtimes until I could pick up what people were talking about. It really was the time of day that I started to just get down about before it even began, and would spend time at my desk rather than try to participate in lunchtime. I'm a naturally sociable person so it was a bit "step back" for me to not be able to understand the conversation, and I especially hated not being able to understand the jokes. I still have this, but of course I have the option to learn the language, which I am doing. I don't have any suggestions on how to improve this experience for you, just want to let you know that you are far from alone in experiencing this, and there are many people out there that understand how isolating it can be in the workplace.
• nelmaven 14y ago
  Someone should tell Google to add speech balloons in their glasses to the people that you're talking too, like in videogames. That would be revolutionary.
  • jurre 14y ago
    I'm sure we can hack it in there once they're released!
  • shade 14y ago
    Like the author, I'm deaf as well. Real time captioning functionality using an improved version of Google's speech-to-text technology (the current implementation on Youtube is VERY hit or miss) was pretty much my first thought when I saw those glasses. That's something I've been dreaming about for 20 years or so.
  • phatbyte 14y ago
    Although this would be awesome, I don't know how we could isolate sound source and make it perceptible to the audio transcriber, on a street with lots of people walking around and talking this would be complicated. Nevertheless this would be a great idea.
    • gwern 14y ago
      Use a directional mike aimed at roughly one's center of vision?
      • vitno 14y ago
        I feel like that cuts out some of the uses... perhaps you could us ML techniques to separate out different voices and then individually transcribe them? edit: wow this is a complicated problem now that I am thinking about it... the amount of processing the brain does...
        • jameshart 14y ago
          I may be wrong, but I believe Kinect uses the information from its vision system that identifies people, to help inform the microphone array system with data that it can use to identify which of the people in front of it is talking at any one time...
• captdeaf 14y ago
  Hi. I'm 32, I'm deaf, and an engineer. Formerly of RIT (though I left long before graduation). Currently located in the Bay Area of CA. My first job was with Amazon. I was their first deaf corporate employee, and had to fight for every interpreter hour I got. Quit after a year. Did remote contracting for a year and a half, then went to Google. Quit after 2.5 years, and now I work in an office with deaf friends, we do consulting+etc (and are hoping to eventually bootstrap our own startup out of our office =). Bottom line: Even Google may have utterly fantastic engineers. But even though they gave me a daily interpreter (11-3pm every day, and on demand outside of that, no problem), it's still isolating. For the other commenters: No deaf person will ever hear anything that isn't told directly to them. Nobody realizes that. In a group discussion, nobody's speaking directly to the deaf person. An interpreter helps, but only somewhat. One analogy I always liked to tell hearing people: Imagine if you lived in a world of telepaths, where everybody could communicate with each other except for you. As for the post: Solitude: Yes, this won't change. Yes, it sucks. I got a cochlear implant last year (yes, at age 31). Though since I wore hearing aids for the majority of my life, I still had enough hearing-related processor neurons in my brain left. It's been fantastic. Group conversations: This is why I work in a deaf office. Sure - the pay is considerably lower than Google, there's no free food and the work may be considered duller, but it's as relieving as going home after wearing a blindfold all year long and being able to remove it and use your eyes again. Managers and teammates may sympathize and wish they could learn, but the stark fact is they really don't have the time. It's a very high pressure environment, and everyone needs to constantly be at their best. This, again, is considerably harder for us. Love: Sure, it's hard, but it's nowhere near impossible, as I can attest (Been with my current, hearing, girlfriend for 4 years). To go off on another note you stuck in here: I agree - deafness is just another adjective. Not an identifier. Interviews - Yes, it sucks that they don't know jack, but you really need to take the lead in your interviews. Don't let them try and figure it out - That wastes their time (not a good thing) and likely leads to a solution that is no good (live meeting). Instead, they'll express their interest in interviewing you - "What time can we call you?". Write back with your requirements, e.g: "I would prefer to converse via (skype, gchat, what have you)." My Amazon screen interview, amusingly enough, was in a Text MUD (The interviewer noted my background in it and had an interest). My Google interview simply via gmail chat. My other screen interviews have been via AIM or GChat, because I demand them. In-person interviews? Require an interpreter. If it's in an area familiar to you, suggest an agency and/or a specific interpreter. Screencasts, talks, video tutorials: Add to this list webisodes like "The Guild" and "SMBC Theater". Video-on-demand like netflix and hulu (both slowly improving), amazon instant video, showtime and hbo, etc. Sadly, nothing ever happens without ridiculous amounts of (pick one) 1) Legal action. 2) Personal work. 3) convincing. Among my personal items of pride is that I am one of the engineers who first convinced them and then developed Captions for YouTube. (Alas, they didn't go for the "community captioning" idea.) Access services: I'm a signer, not cued speech, alas, but this is why I never went to class =). cough. You can find interpreters and transcribers all across the board on the technical spectrum. I went through a number of interpreters before I picked my regular interpreter, and trained her on the vocabulary. (Poor interpreter had to read through a 200 page print-out of internal Google vocabulary!) (Of course, this post did remind me of one very early phone interview with a tech shop while using text relay. "Do you have any experience with eunuchs?" (unix)) Deaf Culture: I am with you there. Friends: Welcome to humanity. We're very social creatures no matter how we try to fool ourselves at first. I was content to be isolated in my dorm room early in college (and before that). But later in college, and ever since, a growing discontent with being isolated from in-person interactions.
• anotherdeaf 14y ago
  TL;DR It sucks to be so isolated (and that’s probably why this post is so long in the first place) Thanks for sharing your experiences. I didn't realize until now how much it meant to me to hear about others going through similar experiences. I’m 22 and I just realized now that I haven't really communicated with another deaf person for about a decade since I graduated from elementary school where there was a small, tight-knit class for handicapped students. The lack of communication might ironically be a byproduct of doing too well in school. It started when I first transferred out of my handicapped class into the “regular” class in elementary school. Then I transferred to an academically prestigious school district while everyone else went to the middle school with the better disability program. And at the moment I’m a student at UC Berkeley, where I learned that there are probably only about 30-something deaf students out of a population of ~36,000 (and, surprise surprise, I never managed to come across them). I guess the point is, after that long of a time, I can't help but start believing that I’m the only deaf person everywhere (which, on second thought, is probably true most of the time). So as I read through your post, I couldn’t help but feel a stabbing pain of recognition that, “hey, I totally had that same feeling before too...” Especially the group conversations, where I often smiled and laughed with everyone pretending that I heard the joke. Oh and there’s the frustrating lack of subtitles in video tutorials and screencasts too. Then again, it’s not new to me to learn based on reading alone, since it’s been the same with almost everything else: elementary school, middle school, high school, university. But still, it sure would have been nice to follow along with the speaker in the videos. Admittedly, my hearing circumstances are rather different from yours since I grew up as a hard-of-hearing kid who could still hear and communicate orally as long as my hearing aids are in. However, two summers ago, I jarringly lost all usable hearing in my left ear without an explanation. And sadly, it just had to be the better ear that I used for everything hearing-related like phone calls and listening to music on earbuds...sort of like losing your right hand when you’re right-handed, so now you have to learn how to use your left hand. Afterward, I learned that I had a genetic condition where my hearing was fated since birth to progressively worsen and peak as I reach my 20s. Since then, I really struggled with hearing in a new, scary way that I never experienced when I could at least hear with hearing aids in both ears. No matter how hard I tried to concentrate on the lipreading and body language, I could barely comprehend others and would miss just as often as I scored. Now I can’t help but laugh at how my younger self really overestimated her pro lipreading and bodyreading skills. Since I was groomed to live and succeed in the hearing culture, it doesn’t help that I can’t do sign language either. However, I just learned about the Cued Speech system for the first time from your post, so I’m rather excited about learning up on this system with my sister later today. But for now, what ended up happening after losing my left ear’s hearing is that, for about an entire year, I didn’t talk. Back then, it was normal for me to go through an entire day speaking less than 5 words (“Hello roommate!”, “Bye roommate!”). My younger sister eventually managed to keep me human by calling me on the phone everyday to chat for hours. (Since I know the sound of her voice like the back of my hand, I can understand her 90% of the time...beats my 50% average by a long shot.) And when we eventually moved in together, she’s my handy second ear out in the wild. We’ve worked out a system where she watches my face closely when I’m interacting with the clerk or waitress so she can smoothly step in at the slightest quizzical or panicky expression and say stuff like “Yes, we’ll both have that drink, thank you.” For now, I’m saving up for a cochlear implant, so I’m optimistic that I’ll manage in the end, especially with the help of my sister along the way. So to Alice when you wake up and read this in the morning (I’m writing this at 3:45AM), thank you. :] I’m so sorry for this wall of texts, I originally had nothing to say and now I ended up with too much to say. I think reading your post really opened up a dam of all these memories, thoughts and feelings. Once again, thank you for sharing, and I hope you do well on your next venture!
• ralfd 14y ago
  Very interesting and informative! The eternal drunken night question "Deaf or blind?" I would still answer I would rather be the first than the latter. Edit: Just remembered this hilarious comic which I read years ago. "Dorm of the Deaf": http://www.dustinland.com/archives/archives319.html http://www.dustinland.com/archives/archives319.html
  • gwern 14y ago
    Ah, that brings back memories of NTID. Especially the deaf sex bit.
• redouane 14y ago
  thanks for sharing the story, that was so deep. i cannot imagine how frustrating it is to be different(deaf, handicapped) in a world that(mostly) is not, and how many simple things we take for granted.
• mgkimsal 14y ago
  Interesting that David would blog openly about setting up interviews. My first assumption was that it was an interview for another job - maybe it wasn't?
• pwim 14y ago
  Have you considered doing your own start up? From reading your story, I saw several opportunities. In particular I don’t know if it’s whether they never saw my note, whether they rejected my resume silently, or whether they attempted calling my phone number (which doesn’t take calls). stood out to me. It wasn't clear to me what happens when someone called the phone, but seemed like it rejected calls. Why not have an answering machine like service, where people can leave a message and it gets transcribed?
  • benvolioT 14y ago
    I believe Google Voice offers machine transcription of voicemails. Not perfect, but better than nothing! I agree that this sounds like a business opportunity. Perhaps use Amazon's Mechanical Turk to outsource transcription to humans (who tend to be better at this than machines)?
    • pbhjpbhj 14y ago
      Twilio do transcriptions as a built in part of their service. IIRC you have to declare the requirement as part of the dial verb. They've got very good walkthroughs that you could use to make an answerphone and have the transcriptions of all calls sent to your email account or wherever.
  • AngryParsley 14y ago
    That sounds like it would work pretty well. Set up voicemail, but have it mention that the person is deaf and that an SMS or e-mail would be more convenient. The tricky part is transcription. If you want better transcription than Google Voice, you have to use a human.[1] That means Mechanical Turk or a TTY operator. My main concern is how viable such a product would be. Depending on who you ask, 0.2-0.4% of the population is considered deaf. That's not a very big potential market. 1. I find it amusing that Google Voice transcribes robot voices particularly poorly. I've had voicemails from PagerDuty transcribed as "This is the FBI" when the actual message started with, "This is PagerDuty".
    • daeken 14y ago
• welp 14y ago
  Wow, this article has hit be pretty hard as well -- I have been profoundly deaf since I was about three and a half. The fact that my deafness hit quite late means that I'm pretty proficient at oral English (thanks Mom and Dad!), it does mean that I miss out on a lot at work or in my social groups. I have had to put so much effort into getting out there and meeting new people, but now that I have, I wouldn't give up any of my friends for the world as they are pretty amazing and make sure that I'm included in everything. As in anotherdeaf's story[0], if I'm at a pub or MacDonald's or something, and they know I've not heard something they will quickly step in to sort it out. None of them get embarrassed or anything when I asked them to repeat what someone else said, and all of them are happy to say the same thing over and over until I've got it -- I guess what I'm trying to say is that when you've found your friends and trained them up, they'll stick right by you. People always ask me how I got to be so confident, but the truth is I'm really not, I'm always terrified of meeting new people but I put myself out there and make a huge effort to talk to them, ask questions and just get on with them in general. It is horrible and I'm always exhausted afterward, but the rewards make it worth it. Just stick at it, talk to people, and you'll be good to go. Have you taken lipreading classes ever? If not, you should definitely consider it. It means that I can happily talk to people in swimming pools, e.t.c., when I can't wear my hearing aid. Insofar as work is concerned, I've never had any issues with special arrangements for interviews -- I tend to email recruiters directly, but IBM, Google and Twitter (as well as other smaller companies) have been more than happy to make special arrangements for me. Always, always ask, the only tip I would give you is to put an obviously fake telephone number in (e.g., 000000000). Oh, and don't worry about the girls. If they're worth it then they will come to you :) And definitely have kids. Even if they ARE deaf, they will still get a lot out of life, and things have been improving so much since I was at primary school all those years ago. Also if (any of) you want to just shoot shit or have someone to chat to about deaf stuff, my email address is in my bio, so feel free to send me an email or add me on gtalk. [0] http://hackerne.ws/item?id=4002231 http://hackerne.ws/item?id=4002231 EDIT: (Also I have just sent out that article and links to some of the comments in here to my best friends, partly as a way to say thanks to them for all the trouble they've put in for me over the years, and also to help them understand where I'm coming from some of the time.)
  • saizai 14y ago
• coofluence 14y ago
  David: Thank you for sharing your story. I was moved by it. Best wishes to you.
• bsoist 14y ago
  Thank you so much for sharing something so personal. I've had deaf friends in my life from time to time over the last 40 years and I thought I understood (as much as any hearing person can). I was wrong. There is so much more that I hadn't even considered.
• jamesrcarr 14y ago
  I've had similar experiences with job interviews as he described. I'm not deaf but am hard of hearing (severe enough that cocheular implants have been recommended) and interviewers consistently require over the phone interviews with no alternatives. Requests to Skype or use gtalk get ignored or shunned upon (I even had one recruiter state they couldn't do this because then there would be no way to verify I am the one answering the questions). HR really needs to get withthe program.
• edw519 14y ago
  Thank you for the wonderful post, David. Perfect for us hackers. In our world, but not completely. With a human touch we often gloss over. And with plenty of fresh data. Now here's what to do: Have business cards printed up with 2 links (and nothing else) on them, one to your blog post and one to this discussion thread. Then hand them out as you see fit. The people you meet in real life deserve to know this just as much as we have. I hope that helps. Best wishes and no matter what else life throws at you, keep building!
• gregd 14y ago
  I read your post with extreme interest and came to a better understanding about being deaf. Thank you for that. I have a few questions. Can you sign? Can you read lips? Can you pronounce words? The reason I ask is I once had a deaf friend. He didn't sign, or at least didn't try to with people that didn't know ASL, but he could read lips. He could read lips so well that he could tell if you were just mouthing a word or actually saying it out loud. He would often admonish us if we simply mouthed a word to him. :) It got to the point where the only impediment to ongoing conversations with him, was that he had to be looking at you. He was so good at reading lips that he would often pickup parts of conversations he wasn't a part of ( like "overhearing" one ). If he wanted to know what was going on, he simply had to look in people's direction and read their lips. It was awkward for the first day or two. Him looking right at you, you getting over mouthing words to him, him replying to you in the tone that only a person who can't hear their own words would. To me, it was no different than learning to speak with a foreigner but the added benefit was that we seemed to pick it up after no more than a week of solid talking, laughing, mocking, and understanding. I seem to recall him telling me to shutup on more than one occasion. Coming out of his mouth, it sounded more like "shauuuuup" with no real emphasis on the T or the P, but I knew what he meant. I don't profess to know whether or not he's gone through the same loneliness as you, but it seems that he found a way to be a part of "normal" that worked for him and for the people around him. Does this mean I wouldn't have learned sign language? No. This also wasn't a work environment and it predates any technological "advancements" that may be at your disposal now.
• masukomi 14y ago
  I appreciate taking the time and effort to put this article out there, and hope that it will help us hearing folk to improve our dealings with deaf people, but I can't help but have the following thoughts: 1) can the poster not lip-read? I realize it's not 100% accurate and you only get the portion of the conversation from the person you're looking at at the moment but from the description it sounds as if the poster isn't getting ANY of the conversations. 2) Didn't take the offered speech therapy funding?!?! WTF. I wouldn't even remotely suggest that every Deaf person needs to learn to speak BUT if you are feeling so left out of conversations with hearing people, and it's effecting you so significantly emotionally not taking advantage of this just sounds crazy. I recognize that us hearing folk can never fully understand what it's like to be deaf, but at the same time this post really makes it sound like the poster hasn't been taking any steps to counter the situation that's causing them emotional distress. Getting your employer to pay for someone to come in and translate for you is NOT the solution. Sure it may help, but unless they're going to follow you around all day it only addresses a teeny portion of the problem. Also, regarding the avoidance of the deaf community: I can understand not identifying with Deaf culture, but getting together with other deaf people doesn't have to be about that. I live in Cambridge, MA (very white and very english speaking). On my street there's a portugese club where people get together simple to communicate in a familiar language. Down the road there's a portugese sports club where they get together to watch soccer. A couple miles away there's a Korean church. These people are primarily getting together because of language. This sounds like exactly the same problem to me. The poster has trouble dealing with oral language, feels isolated as a result, and then actively avoids getting together with people who do speek their language, thus increasing the sense of isolation. Yes, there's much we hearing folk could do to help improve the poster's situation, but it seems as if the poster isn't doing much to improve their situation either.
  • pbhjpbhj 14y ago
    >can the poster not lip-read? // They mention consonantly difficulties - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cued_speech http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cued_speech and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manually_Coded_Language http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manually_Coded_Language seem quite good; from Cued Speech (ibid): "It is a phonemic-based system which makes traditionally spoken languages accessible by using a small number of handshapes (representing consonants) in different locations near the mouth (representing vowels), as a supplement to lipreading." Note also that being a proponent of cued speech apparently sets the author against a large part of the Deaf community who it seems take that as an affront to their culture and language.
• desdichado 14y ago
  Wonderful article, David. I know that it took a lot of inner strength and courage to write that article. You're the best.
• shareme 14y ago
  I am wondering, The Gal that made the atari game machine that fit into a single joystick use to run an IRC chat where her bot would voice out the chats to her while she was at her workstation building things.. We have openCV, etc. why not an IRC bot that translates text chat to Sign Language? My bias, grew up with a neighbor who had a deaf daughter..I ended up learning sign language but I was extremely young at the time so it was easy. Myth about child not learning spoken language is wrong, Greg Gass had deaf parents and even jokes about it in his act as not holding him back from picking up spoken language skills.
• blairbits 14y ago
  Posts like this pain me. None of the hearing among us will ever truly understand what this is like. Posts such as this one give us a glimpse in to what it must be like, but that's all. There's no way we can understand the difficulties experienced day in and day out for the deaf. As a stutterer, I like to think that I understand a bit of what's it's like to not be able to communicate as well as some people. There's times when I have valuable input, but I won't say it out of fear of wasting people's time. Why would I spend a few minutes trying to say a few sentences when I can sit and wait and hope someone else could say the same thing in a few seconds? It's not nearly the same, but I think it gives me an edge in understanding this kind of thing. Posts like this really make me more aware of what everyone can do to help the deaf and other people who struggle with things like this. Take a few minutes out of your day to help someone.
  • olli 14y ago
    I'm also a stutterer. Everyday life is really a challenge when you are handicapped. And working life is even harder. Living in Germany, there is no way to do an interview via chat. They want to telephone with you and see you in person after the phone call. So it's almost impossible to get a job without help or connections. If you are lucky and got a job, you will always earn less than your workmates. The reasoning goes like this: 'Why would we want to pay this guy more money? He won't quit anyway. And if he quits, it's ok. He is handicapped, he should be happy to work for us." Unfortunately, they are right. But even buying a cup of coffee at starbucks is hard. Or buying a hamburger or a beer. You get the idea. And yes, i'm alone and unloved. Is it self-pity? I really don't know. But "normal" people can't imagine what it's like being deaf or being a stutterer etc. In the past, i always tried to be better in some other areas. Be a better programmer, work more, learn lots of things. But in the end, it's useless. The average normal guy will always get the job. Or the raise. Or the girl. Or have a nice chat with the starbucks clerk. My strategy for the future? None, I'm clueless.
• gruseom 14y ago
  I hope you make some good friends at Hacker School.
• abecedarius 14y ago
  For most company interview applications, they ask for a phone number without alternatives. ... I never hear back from these. I've seen the same kind of thing. When I started looking for work in the bay area in 1996, when my email got a response, it was always with "give us a call" or "what's your phone number?" (when I'd already noted I couldn't do phones -- this was before internet phone relay). I'd write back politely reexplaining the issue and offer alternatives, and always, always, that was the last I'd hear from them. To the recruiter or whoever, the deaf candidate is a bit more trouble, weirdness, uncertainty, which apparently was just enough to consistently push me into the wastebasket; to the candidate, any one such episode can be shrugged off, but when it happens repeatedly, for months... that's something else. Try to remember this when you find yourself on the other side of this dynamic. (I finally got an interview with Peter Norvig's startup because he personally remembered me from a bug I'd found in his book. Similar story for other job offers -- contacts matter.)
• cafard 14y ago
  Well, there are hearing women who have ASL fluency--or whom I imagine to have ASL fluency, rather.
• matrix 14y ago
  Kind of late to the game, but David - or anyone else for that matter - I'm deaf too, and happy to talk with you about it. In a nutshell: don't let deafness define you. It's hard, dispiriting work at times, but believe me, there's opportunity out there in all aspects of life if you approach things with the right can-do spirit (yes, this includes finding a partner - I'm exceptionally fortunate in that regard myself :-D ).
• deafscribe 14y ago
  49-year-old deaf professional here. Used to work as a web dev in the 90's, until the dot.com crash in 2000. Last gig was working for the Washington Post. I can relate to everything sanenji's described - I'm quite like him but older. Been married twice, once to a hard of hearing woman, now with a deaf woman. Raised two fantastic children, do freelance writing on the side (here: https://influentialprose.wordpress.com/ https://influentialprose.wordpress.com/ and more recently, here: http://unitedrepublic.org/author/kmcleod/ http://unitedrepublic.org/author/kmcleod/ Web dev work was great starting out. I did all of my early work solo as a consultant, then joined a firm in Arlington, VA and continued to do projects solo there. Because I communicated chiefly by e-mail, I got on good terms with all my co-workers. I didn't join others for lunch for the same reasons Sarenji mentioned, but I didn't much mind since I love to read and used the time to do that. I had a robust social life in the deaf community, so after hours I got my people time. Everything changed when the firm was bought out by a larger company. The new management implemented a team approach, which necessitated at least one team meeting each week. I asked for 'terps, but only got them for the once-monthly company rally meeting. The real work was coordinated during the weekly meetings, and I had no clue what was being discussed. That went downhill fast, and I moved to the Post and stayed there until they began cutbacks. I've spent the last 10 years working at a residential mental hospital for deaf patients, which has been a real adventure. I just want to say to Sarenji - love is where you find it. Whether it's a hearing or deaf person, run with it. Just remember this; no one person is an island. Your mate comes with a network of friends, family and work, and you'll become part of that network whether you enjoy it or not. Chose carefully. Kids - most children of deaf parents are born hearing. Mine were. They'll definitely benefit from growing bilingual. Don't worry about it. If it happens you get deaf kids, you'll be the best kind of Daddy they can possibly have, cuz you've been there and done that. I tutored English at Gallaudet University for a while, and once worked at a residential deaf school. I've got deaf friends who are at that (not mythological) 4th grade reading level and others who read and write probably better than most hearing folks. The common denominator I've found among deaf adults with strong English skills is they were exposed early and often to English with their parents, through reading stories. Some used ASL to explain the English, some just read the story together in signed English, but either way, early and regular exposure makes all the difference. I think it was Helen Keller who observed that being blind cuts you off from things, and being deaf cuts you off from people. Me, I balance my life by socializing in the deaf community and doing what I can professionally in different areas, so I don't feel isolated. Make the most of your abilities, and keep learning, all the time - it's far better than being bored. Given all the accommodations and opportunities available for deaf people in the U.S., we probably enjoy the best environment any deaf folks who have walked this earth have ever known. Which is not to say it's perfect, but it's good enough to grab with both hands and build a satisfying life.
• caffeineninja 14y ago
  David, that was a very eloquent and well-written post and I certainly hope that you came away from writing that with a better sense of well-being. I, too, am deaf, but our experiences are different. I was born deaf and am profoundly deaf with 85+ db loss in both ears. At the risk of sounding conceited, I'm what you would consider a success story. A background: As a child, I lived in San Diego, and my parents (at the advice of my speech therapist) enrolled me in a deaf school in Los Angeles that specialized in mainstreaming deaf students. I went there for 3 years and then joined a normal school in San Diego in 2nd grade wearing hearing aids. At some point in time, I developed an ability to lip read and was able to speak without difficulty. This enabled me to have normal conversations with my hearing peers, and I was able to socialize. So, trying to keep this short, I went through high school, went to college, received a cochlear implant (about 6 years ago), graduated from college with a degree in design, and I've actually worked with a number of companies in teams. I also met my wife (who is hearing) in college, and we've been together 10 years and married for almost 4. I'm currently in my third week working as a lead designer for a YC startup in San Francisco, and it's a 6-member team. Great people, and there have been no issues as far as communication, and the team members here are very willing to accommodate any challenges I may have. With that said, because lip reading requires me to intently watch people, I share your frustrations when it comes to conversations in an open office environment and in group conversations, but I found that one of the best ways to try to control that is to engage in conversation rather than be the 'fly on the wall'. I greatly rely on context when I lip read, so it's important to know what the context of the discussion is. It's actually much harder to lip read someone when you don't know what the context is. Now, I have to say something - you said you use Cued Speech, and you sign. I believe that if you continued to do so, it would only frustrate you further. Furthermore, I'm surprised that you didn't make use of your speech therapy benefit, as that's probably the best way for you to overcome the difficulties you have. Learn how to lip read too - it's a fun party trick. :) Also, try to engage in normal conversations with your co-workers, no matter how challenging it might be. Practice is important. They will respect you for it. I completely understand the challenges of having a handicap and the challenges behind getting accommodation for your handicap, but I find that the best strategy is to ignore your handicap, overcome it, and come up with ways to accommodate yourself, not others. If OP is David, you can contact me here on HN.
• xxqs 14y ago
  David, you're also isolated from silly talks and silly pop music which most of us have to hear around. Also I have no doubt in your career, as you have to be stronger than others to compensate for your challenge. just trying to find positive sides in your uneasy life :) I also bookmarked your github page, as there may be some funded work popping up in some future
• fehrbehr 14y ago
  One of my hero's and closest friends is deaf -- my younger brother. This is a wonderful article. Honest and sincere. Very cool of your founders to let you post this. Seeing what life is like from the techie side of the road as a deaf man is a great reminder to work more collaboratively with our colleagues whether they are deaf, or any other cool things that make them unique. e.g. English as a 2nd or 3rd language. etc. Wishing you the best of luck.
• opminion 14y ago
  Great post in so many ways. Beyond other deaf people, migrant knowledge workers will know best about what he is talking about when describing social relationships at work.
• socratease 14y ago
  Have a look at the article someone posted about Swype, from the man who invented T9. "The man who invented the keyboard, twice." There is an interesting comment in there about AOL's response to making things easier for deaf users.
• wesbrown18 14y ago
  I read your post, David, and I found it very akin to my experiences. In a lot of ways, I am you -- but fast-forwarded fifteen years. I am in the prime of my career now, considered to be one of the best in my rather specialized and intersecting fields of high performance computing and automated malware analysis; I am a Chief Architect of a startup company, engineering manager of a small crackerjack development team, and I am Deaf. I empathize with the feeling of being the last to know things. Unless it is written via email, IM, or directed at me personally, I do not know it. I have found a company structure that mitigates that particular issue, in that I am part of and leading a remote engineering team. There are no members of the team that share offices, so all communications and 'lunchroom conversations' actually happen over IM, the phone, or in the group chat room. For a long time, I was just as isolated as you are -- for many years, I was the 'hacker in the corner' that you slid food to under the door, along with tasks to do. I was a security consultant that was given targets to hack, and write reports. But I did very little customer interaction, by intent and design. I am old enough that text relay over a TTY was my only option. I had a US Robotics modem attached to a Sun Sparcstation in my basement, that was BAUDOT capable. I had GNU screen running, attached to that serial port, and sent the console up to my office. In this way, I was able to answer and make calls from anywhere that I had a SSH connection, including my early text-only RIM Blackberry. Text relay is awkward and horrible in a lot of ways, and I share your pain. I can trace the turning point in my career when Video Relay Service started being offered over the Internet, along with the early model Sorenson videophones. Because I was able to communicate fluidly via the interpreter, using voice-carry-over, when neccessary, my coworkers started to see me as more of a concrete person. Because of the doors that Video Relay opened, versus text relay, I was able to emerge from my 'hacker in the corner' persona, and advance to become an extroverted and respected Principal Consultant who managed client engagements. I have a pretty cool Tandberg/Cisco E20 Videophone on my desk with built in VCO. It has a Bluetooth connection to my hearng aids, so when I dial a number, I get the audio shunted straight to my ears. Further, with the built in VCO, there is no call complexity in voicing for myself. I just pick up the handset, or speak at the screen in speakerphone mode. When I speak, the other hearing people hear my voice. When the hearing people speak, the sign language interpreter translates what they say; using the contextual and spatial nature of American Sign Language, the interpreter is also able to identify which speaker it is with a body shift. Because there is very little latency versus transcibing, the conversation is natural and fluid. Two times a week, as engineering manager, I lead the conference call where the engineering team gets together and gives status updates and issues. I also handle client and customer calls that require a personal touch from an engineer. Reading your post about your frustrations dealing with the phone, I do need to point out that the easiest path is to accomodate the interviewer or other people's request for a phone number. All the services that offer telecommunications access for the deaf are required by the FCC to provide a real and personal number that anyone can dial. This is the key factor here -- rather than trying to tell them to not use a phone, give them a phone number that is linked to the access service of your choice. This includes CapTel, which is real time transcribing of phone conversations, by an operator that uses dictation. http://www.captel.com/ http://www.captel.com/ I know that you do not identify yourself as culturally Deaf, or as a fluent signer, but American Sign Language interpretation provided by a competent video relay service agency that is selective about its staff is far more fluid and latency free than captioned telephone. The interpreter can even indicate in expression if he or she is unsure about the subject matter -- and more importantly, the interpreter can convey the tone of voice that the other person is using at the moment. This is what has allowed me to be an effective consultant, being able to determine emotion, even by proxy. As far as love, girls, dating, and marriage, I am married to a Deaf/HoH girl myself. I keenly empathize with the frustration that is dating when you are deaf. Dating is supposed to be a nice experience, where you figure out if you're compatible or not. But if you are concentrating so intently on trying to understand the other person on a date, then how can you feel the chemistry or spark that is supposed to happen? My first date with my eventual wife was a moment of grace, a breath of fresh air. It was the first date that I've ever been on, that I laughed and felt comfortable at. Yes, we were nervous, yes, there were some dialectal and communications difference, but I enjoyed myself and so did she. One date and then another, and I moved to be closer to her, proposed, and married her. We primarily sign in our household, because it is the communications method that is the most relaxing. When we sign, we do not concentrate, or feel frustrated. When we emerge into the world outside, it is not as terrible a chore to put on our hearing aids and concentrate intently on hearing people -- because we have our retreat and solititude. You should not choose not to marry a d/Deaf/HoH girl based on how likely it is that you will have deaf or hearing children. The majortiy of Children-of-Deaf-Adults I have met have felt themselves enriched by the experience of being a CODA, of being truly bilingual in a widely different form of communications. They find much to laugh about, in the form of communications. By being CODAs, they are enriched by bilingualism rather than crippled by sign. I am not advocating against Cued Speech as a primary form of communications; as a matter of fact, when I think about it, Cued Speech has some advantages over sign language when it comes to hearing people. It does not require them to learn an acutal language; it is easier to teach eight handshapes and eight locations around the face. It is also easier to do Cued Speech and speech rather than simultaneously doing American Sign Language and English. Cued Speech is a change of mode rather than a change of language. The sad reality however is that there will probably never be any form of telecommunications access that used Cued Speech. I would actually use a Cued Speech VRS service if it was available, as it does not require me to merge two linguistic streams in my brain, Spoken English and American Sign Language into a conversational model. And the alternative, CapTel, doesn't have the same sideband communications capabilities or the reduced latency that American Sign Language interpretation offers. In a nutshell, my message is, there are options to ease your path through life, including Captel, and VRS. Do not exclude love based on deafness. Let me know when you're done with Hacker School, and we can discuss whether a remote job with us might be a good fit for you. We're doing some of the coolest stuff around over here, building a special-purpose supercomputing cluster.
• saizai 14y ago
  I have kinda the inverse issue. I'm hearing, but I have a neurological disorder that causes occasional unpredictable periods of mutism, during which ASL is my primary means of communication. Sometimes that also requires emergency communication because I need immediate help, and especially in those situations I can't use a pen 'cause of spasticity; it's literally either ASL or yes/no grunts. :-/ I learned ASL just 'cause it's an awesome language, and I find it sad that this option is totally ignored by most people. As languages go it's very easy to learn, most d/Deaf people are happy to help, and it's far less clunky than cued speech or that godawful SEE. So I can empathize with the frustration of not being able to communicate — for me it's on the other end, I can understand everyone around me but can't get them to understand me. I kinda wish everyone would just learn some ASL. It's often useful even if you're talking hearing-to-hearing, signed mode is just plain different from spoken mode in lots of neat ways, ... but I guess most people aren't language geeks like me.
• trebor 14y ago
  David, thanks for the glimpse into what it's like to be deaf. I've wondered what it would be like, but it's pretty hard to imagine the near total isolation. I've met several deaf people, but I guess I haven't taken the time to think about how I would involve a deaf person in a conversation. I think that part really threw me for a loop. That would be challenging. I know that if you ever felt left out, or that you missed something, in a conversation with me, or in a group, then don't hesitate to bump me. I'll be plenty happy to give anyone who's deaf either what was said or a summary of the conversation thus far.
• anandnilkal 14y ago
  Hi david, though I have not encountered a deaf person in my work life and chances are very slim. your article has indeed educated me about a thing or two. it certainly encourages me to be more patient and more communicative.
• hellerbarde 14y ago
  Yay, this is heartwarming. David, you are awesome! :)
• cmvf51 14y ago
  Thank you for sharing that post and having the courage to express your feelings. I could never understand what it must be like to be deaf. But being gay, and a mid-20's software developer, I felt many of the same feelings you described reading your post. It took me many years after college to finally work for a company where there was another developer who was gay and also happened to be my age. We never worked together on projects, but did talk after-work sometimes, just knowing that I wasn't some sort of anomaly was reassuring in many ways. Like Deaf pride, I don't identify with Gay pride either. Being a shy person to begin with, I have no desire to call more attention to myself. My friends and family know, but I never worked out how to ever share that with co-workers. Unfortunately as a result people assume I'm straight. In a male-dominated work environment, that can be extremely isolating, even hurtful when the inevitable gay-bashing lunch conversation comes up, those are moments where I would gladly borrow your deafness. Over the years, it becomes a lot easier as I learned to reconcile my feelings, and I figure it'll get easier when I meet someone special enough to frame in a picture, and put on my desk at work. Just like you will.
• danhoh 14y ago
  Amen Bro. Amen.
• oncetoomany 14y ago
  I have a family member who is hearing impaired, as well as having worked closely with someone who is hearing impaired ... I have mixed emotions reading this article, and am glad you were able to see a path before starting another new adventure... remember people aren't mind readers, if you don't show them, they will not understand without having traveled your path before... GL
• eka 14y ago
  Thanks David. You are so correct about access services. I am dyslexic/disgraphic to the point that I can't write with a pen and paper. I flet like access services was interseted in helping me pass classes but not excel. Having issues with reading and writing is nothing like being deaf but many of us who want to achieve despite/with our disabilities struggle with the expectation that we accept merely passing. When I took organic chemistry I was unable to write out chemical formulas and at the time there was no software to quickly type that information. My school provided a note taker who was averaging a D in the class when I needed a B or better to graduate and keep my scholarship. In the end another student and I had to birbe a classmate for notes, which was a violation of the honor code. Being dyslexic is nothing like being deaf
• benipk 14y ago
  As someone who's been deaf since 18 months of age (Meningitis), I feel your pain David. I'm fairly lucky, as my hearing loss means I'm just within the bracket of being able to use a hearing aid, which are the most powerful ones on the market, but I suspect within a decade or two I'm probably going to need a cochlear implant myself. The difficulty for me is being between two worlds, I can speak well enough that most people don't realise I'm deaf, which creates its own problems as they won't compensate for speaking to a deaf person, even if they know how. Since I was always able to hear with hearing aids, I never learnt to sign as I and others didn't feel it was needed. Lip-reading and a degree of hearing as enough to get by. So when you can't hear well enough to be completely at ease among normal people, but you can't sign either, so you're barred from the totally deaf community too. I'm in my 30s now, and I've been through the denial, self-loathing and social ostracisation through my teens at school and 20s in University that made life pretty hard. As you've pointed out in your article, people don't intentionally exclude you if you're deaf - but if you miss every other word in a conversation it gets embarrassing asking people to repeat themselves every few seconds! A work environment isn't too bad in my experience, social environments are a whole 'nother thing though. Pubs? Clubs? Even a quiet cafe usually has too high a level of background noise to understand someone... That said though, don't be disheartened when it comes to relationships. I've had 3 'proper' relationships over the years, the first wasn't until I was older than you are now. All of them have been positive, and my girlfriend in each case has never had an issue with my hearing. If someone wants to get to know you, they will make small sacrifices, small changes in their behaviour if that's what it takes to get to know you. If they're not prepared to make any changes, well, chances are they're not worth knowing in the first place! Simple things like "face me when you're speaking", "Don't talk with your mouth covered", "Make sure you have my attention before you start speaking" are not that hard to do, and remember: It says a lot about the person in question if they can't even be bothered with such simple things. Sadly, you may find that your deafness will shape what kind of job you ultimately feel most comfortable in. It'd be nice to think that in this day and age, any job should be open to someone with a disability, but that's certainly not going to be the case. Personally, I'm self-employed with my own company after dabbling in the Biotech industry after leaving Uni. The key thing is, there are awesome people out there who will be good friends. It's just harder to find them for you than it is for normal people. I'm lucky in that the friends I made in High School are still, 15 years later, the best friends I have ever made. Even if it sucks to go into social situations because being the guy "sitting quietly in the corner" gets old very fast, know that every so often you will hit it off with someone and it'll make up for all the crappy times!
• Deflord 14y ago
  I know this is probably a few days late but just came across this article. Now this is an interesting perspective, I am deaf as well - and I have a bilateral cochlear implant. Now I have been working in the IT industry for over 16 years as a developer, infrastructure support guy and more. I have worked for companies such as IBM, Shell Oil Company which of course required alot of interaction. One thing though we the deaf individual have to be proactive and we can't be reactive. Most of the time the hearing counterparts really do not know what we can or can't do. Unless we become a bit more assertive. Now but one thing I am a bit puzzled, you indicate you don't want to be a part of the deaf community - but what about organizations and individuals who are part of HLAA? Hearing Loss Association which is really more geared to "oral" deaf individuals but not necessarily in an ASL format. I am not really understanding this part. I am very involved in the deaf community, as well interact with people from HLAA and as well part of the hearing community. But I have to be proactive to make things happen. And don't look as one or two people from the deaf community and think they ALL are like that because they aren't. It would be like everyone reading your article right now and thinking all of us are like you - but we aren't. I chose NOT to think in a negative light and think positively. It is a tiring job but it is the only way we can educate our peers otherwise we get lost in the limelight. And honestly society nowadays are much more sensitive and understanding about people with disabilities than in the past. I admire your passion to really get out there - and admire the fact that you wrote an article on this. But the same time - think positively life is too short! :) And also - the talk about getting with a deaf or hard of hearing girl and having deaf/hoh babies is unrealistic. It has to come from the genes (like mine - my parents are deaf) but if you because deaf because of sickness or something else and if you hook up with a deaf/hoh lady who also became deaf because they were sick or non-genetic reasons your chances of having deaf babies are VERY VERY slim. I have seen so many CODA (Children of Deaf Adults) who have succeeded well in life - my kids who are CODA - all three of them are in Honors Program (and they all three are hearing) and their first language was ASL. Again as I said, think positive you will go far!
• tchang2010 14y ago
  Thanks for sharing, David. I have the same experience as you even though I am not deaf. The things about me is that I am a Hmong refugee from Thailand, uneducated, and had no background knowledge of American. At the ages of 13, I came to the United States not knowing a word in English. I started learning English alphabet and words when I arrived here. After a year of trying to learn English, I went straight to high school. That's when I realized how hard it was to live in a world where you don't understand what people are saying, but the situation force you to live with it. I have been in the same situation as you, which to live among others who could easily communicated to one another. I went to high school without friends and without talking to anyone for 2 years. after 2 years in high school, I was able to understand some simple conversations use in every day life and able to ask some questions. I was and still am the quietest guy in class. I am in college now and want to express myself more but couldn't do it because of the limited English I have. tchang
• grantpalin 14y ago
  Being hard of hearing (severe to profound), I can relate to much of the OP's post. I use hearing aids, but communication is still challenging. I also rely on watching who is speaking for lip-reading, facial language, and body language; putting those together with what I hear creates a "complete" input for me. For TV, I rely on captioning, and on subtitles for DVDs. I don't listen to the radio, or much music. The web is great for communicating and learning because it's very visual, but podcasts and screencasts, despite possibly being of interest, aren't much good to me. I prefer to do most conversing in person; over the phone it's far too easy to miss something, or confuse one sound or word for another (letters: b, c, d, g, e; numbers: 15, 50 (pronunciation)). Heavy accents are quite challenging to handle over the phone. I've had to have another person help me with telephone calls for official things such as banking, gov't matters, etc. I'm a university student. In small classes hearing isn't too bad, but larger classes in lecture halls are much harder to follow. It's easier when the teacher is doing most of the talking, and harder when it's a more interactive class, with students contributing. In a working context, clear communication is important. Even in person it's easy to miss a key word or phrase, or confuse one for another. Not only that, but I once interviewed for a web developer position, and was openly discriminated against when my hearing difficulty was revealed. The interview didn't go past this point; I could have done the job with my skill set, but the boss made an issue out of my hearing. I'm a very visual person: I like to see, to read, to write, and to draw. Being an avid reader, I enjoy novels and other reading materials, including the web. I'm mostly self-taught in web development by reading tutorials and books and reviewing code by other people. In closing, loss of hearing, whether partial or complete, raises barriers to work, education, socializing, etc. They can be worked around to some extent, but they are still they, and as I found out can actively harm you.
• auhaus 14y ago
  Thanks David for sharing your thoughts. It is a really powerful piece. Wish I know Cued Speech to communicate with you. Why is Cued Speech not more popular. What can be done to popularize Cued Speech? Seems like it has application not only only for the hearing impaired, but for the elderly who require the use of hearing aids to communicate with others.