Came across this: Braille Makes a Comeback
(To read the full article, you’d have to sign up for a free registration.)
But the part of interest was this:
Among some students, families, and educators, use of Braille was seen as a sort of failure, some advocates say. Among the visually impaired, about 90 percent are believed to […]

There’s a fair furor at present over DBC, the details of which I hardly need to recount. But I came across this, and it has got me thinking:
The deep division between the subgroups reflects the contrasting core values of deafness. For the oral deaf and users of c.i. people, being able to hear is […]

I came across this article over the summer and was immediately struck by the obvious parallels: So let’s just go back to segregation, then. I thought many of the things she had to say about the issues black children face in schools is very much like what deaf children face in schools. In […]

You know, on a theoretical level, I “understand” audism. I can see how the social structures have hearing down as the default in so many ways, above and beyond just the obvious ones. I can see how the state of being deaf is medicalized and so on.
But on an emotional level, […]

Over the last couple of months I have found myself objecting to the term “oralist,” at least as applied to myself. In addition, the more I contemplate the terms “oral failure” and “oral success,” the angrier I get. Why?
Let’s take “oralist” first. I can see that it’s used in […]

I found this question very interesting. Now, I am what would be considered an “oral success.” However, like John, I am very careful, and actually have been for years: even not being aware of deaf culture, etc, I knew my story wasn’t typical and should not be used to support oralism across the […]

Had an interesting email conversation a few days ago with and thought I’d put the gist of it here…
jcortese: I can get behind the idea that you can’t treat all deaf kids/adults the same way, because there isn’t the same level of hearing in all of them.  Like you said, HAs work great […]

I’ve been watching this video on cued speech and I must say I’m quite ambivalent.
On the one hand, it blows all the other codes I’ve seen out the water. And it actually assists in lipreading. I mean, it’s seamless. It works with the phonetics and words, and if you don’t quite pick […]

Just stumbled, courtesy of and , across the Nicaraguan Sign Language issue. It sounds absolutely fascinating: Here is an article from NY Times (”A Linguistic Big Bang“), plus some further discussion by ozarke on her journal. There’s any number of fascinating aspects to this, but to summarize, deaf children in Nicaragua have […]

Nothing new, of course — many people have pointed out similar things. But I keep coming back to the whole question of deaf education and how it’s gotten so screwed over by the ADA.
I mean, when the ADA came out I thought it was great. Not perfect, nothing ever is. But in […]