Just because YOU don’t see the pervasive discrimination we experience, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist!
Just because WE can’t hear, doesn’t make us any less capable. You don’t get to decide what is in OUR best interest!
Just because many of us are disempowered into silence, doesn’t mean you can discriminate against us freely!
Check out this video of my little one using baby sign 🙂 He has been signing for booby since about 5 months old. It started with squeezing my finger or boob and progressed to making fists, and then finally to the opening and closing repeatedly of his fist to...
So my sister in law came across a deaf blog ranting about some dude from The Voice, Andy Dexterity doing Auslan when he is not deaf. There was a lot of anger about cultural appropriation and comments about Andy signing badly. It prompted my interest because obvious...
https://youtu.be/qFcFpWzIQNk First, this is an excellent and well done video, everybody needs to watch it! I'd like to touch on my first experience of this video as it completely slammed me. It was used as an educational tool in a support coordination course I was...
People keep calling my phone and I've finally worked it out! Deaf people can't possibly own phones, and this must be common knowledge! Of course!! This totally explains why there will be difficulty explaining to a caller why the deaf phone owner cannot come to the...
No really. I've removed names for privacy as this isn't about any of these individuals personally, but rather the social/cultural context of this discourse. Here are the highlights for those of you without the ability to see the image posted below: "I wonder how...
Even the best lip-readers are only able to understand approximately 30% to 40% of what is actually said on the lips.
– Science Direct: Lipreading, Patients with Disabilities
When I saw the statistics on lipreading, I was shocked. Approximately only 30-40% of words are able to be lipread on the lips. How could this be? As a deaf woman myself, I knew that I definitely got a lot more than this overall in my daily conversations.
I started paying more attention to the meta of lipreading, and you know what? I noticed that I take in and access a lot of information in the intense energy and focus I expend on lipreading.
Lips, body language, lips, facial patterns, lips, knowledge of the context, lips, eye movements, lips, familiar phrases and language patterns, lips, familiar lip patterns, lips, familiar people, lips, predictive behaviour, lips, hangman, lips, automatic brain processes without thinking, lips.
My eyes are feeling tense already, just thinking about the extent of this information. How in the world am I doing this and am still able to piece together a conversation in real time, AND think a reply, voice a reply, AND access all the memorised speech training so I am saying it properly. Crikey. Maybe my intelligence and brain power is coming to bat for me in ways I have taken for granted my entire life. No time to think about poor me in a hearing world. The conversation just moves too quickly and I gotta keep up or be left out.
And left out I am. It especially happens in group situations. I get bored and stop trying so hard because trying is not getting me anywhere much in groups. I can understand the 30-40% statistic in these cases! I get 30% if I am lucky!
Keep this in mind next time you communicate with a deaf person. Lipreading ability varies across the deaf population, and even for these people who are excellent lipreaders… we cannot lipread in a way that will guarantee the same accessibility to a conversation a hearing person would have.
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