OK, I confess that my last post was more a reaction to another post that stated NAD uses “visual language” instead of ASL and I neglected to investigate the facts. However, one of my commenters asked where on the NAD site do they use “visual language” in the first place?
Um.
Very interesting. OK, a quick google tutorial. If you go to www.google.com and enter something like:
ASL site:www.nad.org
It will show you ALL the occurrences of “ASL” on the NAD website only. I get “about 209″ results from google (the “about” is because they will fold some similar results, although you can always force it to show them all).
Now, let’s try
"visual language" site:www.nad.org
In this case, I put quotes around “visual language” to tell google that the two words must appear next to each other in the results. This time, I get “about 32″ results. Interesting! I notice many of them refer to something called Visual Language Interpreting, so I do another search on that, which gives me “about 20″ results.
So the sum total of references to “visual language” on the NAD website appears to be 12. Here’s a listing of those:
Position Statement - National Association of the Deaf
In addition, they do not guarantee the development of cognition or reduce the benefit of emphasis on parallel visual language and literacy development. …
www.nad.org/cipositionLearning Sign Language - National Association of the Deaf
You need to remember that sign language is a visual language. This means that the brain processes linguistic information through the eyes instead of ears. …
www.nad.org/site/pp.asp?c=foINKQMBF&b=103785American Sign Language - National Association of the Deaf
Sign language is a visual language. This means that the brain processes linguistic information through the eyes instead of ears. It also means that facial …
www.nad.org/ASLFAQsModel ASL Bill - National Association of the Deaf
(1) American Sign Language (ASL) means a visual language that is separate and distinct language involving the hands, arms, facial markers, …
www.nad.org/modelaslbillEarly Intervention Providers - National Association of the Deaf
This could include users of a visual language, such as American Sign Language, or a spoken language; and; information and resources for assistive listening …
www.nad.org/site/pp.asp?c=foINKQMBF&b=2639887White paper - National Association of the Deaf
… that environment is NOT a local day care center, or even the home unless the parents themselves are fluent in the visual language. …
www.nad.org/site/pp.asp?c=foINKQMBF&b=101204
Interestingly, when I tried searches for SEE1 or SEE2, I got no results. I got bad matches on “SEE” because it also matched to the word “see” and I couldn’t make the search pay attention to uppercase only (a curious omission in google searching).
Anyway, I’m not really making any conclusions from this. This is analyzing only their website (which appears to have a wonderful treasure trove of old articles and such that are worth browsing through, although I see that some things haven’t changed very much…). This has nothing to say on what specific things they have done (or not done, which is even harder to find out) or how they go about doing this.
I also tried to google generally on “visual language” but this butts right up against concepts in computer science and is basically useless. So I wasn’t able to check for any associations between SEE and visual language (if anyone has any ideas, you know where the comment box is 
)
Anyway, next time I’ll do a little more fact checking.
So…the point is that NAD is trying to straddle the fence on language by using the term “visual language” instead of ASL?
That is, blurring the distinctions between ASL, SEE, Cued Speech and other forms of sign in a blanket expression?
Hm. That would be appropriate in the professional realm where one does a lot of hedging and obscuring and avoiding taking positions, but not for a social advocacy agency.
Should NAD be more decisive in its positions on issues instead of trying to cover everything in deafdom?
I do understand why they took this position. In fact, it’s called the “National Association for the Deaf”.. it was created for ALL deaf citizens, and I think they are proper to focus on that. Of course, everyone knows, off-hand that NAD is very pro-ASL, and not supportive of “non-visual” language at all.
Think about it. if NAD wanted to advocate, for say, more captions on TV shows, it would do them no good to be branded as the ‘ASL people” instead of the “visual language people”. It makes for better public relations.
I think they are correct to do this. I think they DO have some informationa bout ASL on their site, although I have to go check. I’m just tired and need to go to bed.
Good post.
Oh, with 209 references to ASL versus about 12 for “visual language” it seems they’re just fine with supporting ASL, on their website at least. There may be questions about how they present publicly, or on the battles they choose to wage, or other things they have done or not done, but I think the usage of “visual language” on their website is actually a non-issue. But I don’t have enough context to say much more than that, unfortunately. I’m very interested in all your comments.
Interesting tidbit. Yea, I agree with your conclusion, BEG. This ‘visual languages’ thing is a non-issue. I still think NAD could do better on taking a stand on some issues though.