Being 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?

Hi, sister here. It's 8 AM and she's (^) currently sleeping soundly near me, but I'd thought I'd contribute my own 2 cents on the whole matter.

I'm Alice, and I've grown up with a partially deaf sister whose hearing has gotten progressively worse in the recent years. I've watched her listen to me with ease years ago to leaning over and struggling to what I have to say now today. I'm currently studying music and aspiring to be a composer, and what does scare me is the thought that my sister won't be able to listen to my music when the time comes. She's the one who's supported my endeavor the most.

And now that I think about it, I never really "feel" that she has this hard of hearing situation. It's never been that way to me, I just accepted her since I was young and we've both been raised normally together like everyone else except for those awfully boring visits to The Hearing Doctors in which I frittered waiting around whining what's for lunch.

My sister has been fortunate enough to have the opportunities to grow into the person she is now. Of course, that doesn't undermine her struggles at all, but I understand that everyone has a different experience even within a group of relatable topics. I'm glad that my sister's never been socially isolated or bullied, like another close friend that I have.

I'll call him C here. He's an online friend (real as any other friend) and I cherish him a lot. He's 21, partially deaf, and has had cochlear implants. His life experiences differ a lot from my sister's. He's faced much adversities. C's been bullied when he was younger, has gone through depression, been socially isolated (at one point homeless) but is making considerable progress today in his game design education and I believe he'll succeed on his own someday. There was a time I didn't understand why he was so self conscious about his voice. The first time I heard him, I realized his speech was slurred - especially with the 's' and 'l' if I remember correctly. Once I got past a certain threshold, it was fairly easy to understand him and I didn't pay too much attention to some pronounciation difficulties.

Although we've been slowly drifting apart and now we're busy immersed in our lives, I won't forget the stories that he's told me or the things he's taught me. OP, thank you for posting your story. You sound like someone's who been through a lot.

And also -- don't give up on romance. I forgot to mention that there was a point in time that I liked C (romantically!), and he knew that very well. What can I say? I was attracted to his wisdom and motivation to keep on going, no matter how tough things got. :)

Though of course, she was also living in a country where most people speak English, so I'm sure that must have helped. I'll have to ask her how long it was before she started school again, and how well she understood English by that point.

You couldn't be more wrong! Deafness is far worse a disability than blindness for most people in terms of integrating into and succeeding in society. The reason for this is that human beings are social creatures and deafness isolates people, while blindness doesn't. This is the reason that there is a whole unique deaf culture that tends to stay separate from mainstream culture. Within deaf culture, deaf people are not isolated.

This is the reason that many deaf people are morally opposed to cochlear implants. They feel that it is an attack on their culture--the culture that allows them to belong somewhere and thrive.

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".