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.
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.
"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.)
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.
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?
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.
Sometimes I feel the same way, though I recognize that this is a kind of 80/20 rule as well. While I could do without about 80% of spoken word I hear everyday, missing the other 20% would really throw me off. And this is just the hearing part, not being able to express yourself would probably be even worse.
Viewed from afar it might not seem such a huge disadvantage, but I even stopped being a strict vegetarian because it can be such a hassle sometimes. In theory you can always find vegetarian alternatives, but it can be tiring to always have to explain yourself and go the extra mile. If cutting one group of foods out of my daily intake is too much for me to bear every day, how could I judge what losing speech and hearing would do to me?
Easier said than done. You've never been deaf, so how would you know? Even if you try to imagine being in their footsteps, it's not the same. I definitely can't imagine myself living in complete silence. If you live in silence, the isolation will probably make any normal person depressed.
> I actually don't think my life would be seriously negatively impacted by being deaf
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.
Maybe for normal people being deaf would be a huge disability, but as a nerd, I would rather be deaf than even just have really bad (uncorrectable) eyesight.
Professionally, you could absolutely live a full life as an individual contributor while deaf with minimal accomodation. It might be hard to be an entrepreneur or senior manager, just due to the large number of in-person meetings required, but even that could be worked around (missing out on the informal communications would be a problem in some places). I would have zero problem working with a deaf engineer where all communication had to be by IM/irc/email/commit, vs. verbal; it would be just like a remote worker, which we have huge experience with as a profession now. I mean, I IRC with people in the same room to avoid distracting other people, to be more clear, and to produce a record. A deaf coworker would basically mean I could wear my HD600 open headphones instead of my DT770 closed headphones, that we'd need a visual paging system and alarm, and not a whole lot more. I've worked with people who spoke such horrible English that it was far preferable to have them write vs. speak, too.
I agree the "growing up deaf" part might be a lot different (and probably worse), but as an adult, if you suddenly went deaf (as has happened to me on several occasions), not a huge problem.
Looking for a workplace with a lot of remote workers is probably the best way to be a first-class team member while deaf.
The deaf can drive. Unfortunately many deaf drivers try to have conversations with their passengers, leading to a similar situation of texting and driving.
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.
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 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.
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.
Sorry I understand the point you're trying to make with your analogy, but I think it greatly understates the fact that deaf people have to deal with this in EVERY aspect of their lives, and not just work. No disrespect, just wanted to point that out.
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.
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.
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.
No. I learned English at home, and I kept up with it through TV and school. Also, I've always preferred to read in English, which probably helped a lot.
I learned most of my early english from TV. I grew up in the Netherlands, speaking Frisian at home and Dutch at school. At the time dutch tv did not offer much programming aimed at children, the more interesting cartoons to be found on cable tv were on english language channels. I would tape Transformers episodes and watch them over and over.
Later on I started consuming other media (video games + video game magazines, american comics), so that by the time they started teaching english to me at school I was already relatively fluent.
A Dutch friend of mine said watching English-language TV was a great help learning english. Just hearing the language a lot does wonders for recognising the sounds of words. Plus she said a lot of shows would have Dutch subtitles, so you get the link between sound & meaning.
An ex-girlfriend of mine moved to the US from Romania at the age of ten without any knowledge of English. As an adult she speaks completely fluent English with no hint of an accent. She claims that she learned English by watching TV.
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.
In Romania movies on TV and at the movie theaters are also aired in English with Romanian subtitles. English is also learned from school, sometimes from the second grade.
When I was 11, I was watching Cartoon Network in English (yeah, I still love cartoons) and I could understand everything. My spoken English is still not so great, but it's nothing that couldn't be fixed with a month living in the US or UK.
Just another anecdote, but every Dutchman and Swede I've met has a much better grasp of the English language than any other country, and they all attribute it to how much American TV they watch. Probably just a corollary relationship given how English classes start at an early age, but I can't imagine the practice hurts.
I find it quite easy to find a correlation between countries that dubs their TV/movies with poor English comprehension.
It really helps and without it people wouldn't be in contact with English that often (at least before the internet) and if you never refresh your knowledge it will most definitely fade. Yes, we start learning English at an early age but a lot of students excel way faster than teaching allows once they get over the initial hurdle (much thanks to TV and internet).
As a Swede I feel that we are quite good at understanding English but we are quite poor (comparatively) at speaking it (although we can often make ourselves understood it isn't pretty), which isn't that surprising considering how seldom most people in Sweden need to talk in English (but we constantly consume it).
Compare France and Germany with Sweden and I think the biggest advantage that Sweden has is that we don't dub any movies or TV (except for cartoons and movies targeted towards small children). That and that people in France tend to get upset every time the are reminded that french isn't the only language in the world.
I don't think it's quite as simple. Poland has been dubbing foreign TV/movies since the early 90s (in addition to having a rich homegrown tradition of children's entertainment) and English among younger generations is widespread and quite good, if not Scandinavia/Netherlands good.
I'd be willing to bet a correlation with country's population and relative economic power would be much stronger.
It might be then good to analise another country, a poorer one and not in the north, say Portugal. Almost nothing is dubbed in Portugal and you can see quite a difference between Portuguese and Spanish people speaking English. Same for French or Italian people.
Still, Scandinavian youth seem to have almost perfect English and that is not true about Portugal where it's mostly good enough. I'm sure education has a role here somewhere.
That's an observation i've made myself a dozen times too, i'm from Flanders (Belgium) where basically not a single show on public television is dubbed, all shows are subtitled and I'm confident that it has been a great stimulation in my ability to speak and understand english, even though it's not perfect. When I look at the other side of the country (Wallonia) where they speak french natively almost all shows on public TV networks are dubbed in french. The wallonians I know are pretty hard to understand when they speak english, they might grasp the grammar and spelling but their pronunciation is really bad.
PS: I don't mean to generalize here, it's just my personal observation, of course there are a lot of french talking people who speak perfectly understandable english fluent. I just feel that the fact that I've watched english spoken television shows all my life has helped me a huge amount in learning english.
tv is a very effective medium for improving command on english. in my case i started with english when i was around 10 and then slowly built up my language skills starting with disney cartoons > national geographic > tv and movies
When I lived in Antwerp, I learned a fair bit of Dutch by watching Dutch TV with English subtitles. I have lost it all since then but I got to the point that I could generally make out basic conversation in shops and so on.
Works really well if you are a kid. You get really solid foundations then and you gradually improve.
This is why its important for your kids to watch Cartoon Network in English. I think this is how I and a whole lot of other 20-somethings learned the language.
I had learned a good amount of English by playing NES games at the age of six. I watched and understood Akira four years later. The film was in Japanese, subbed in English. Note, I don't speak a word of Japanese.
Watching English TV shows at an early age will give you an advantage later on.
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.
Actually, you're right. Sometimes the girl I like is deaf, sometimes not. I should be fine with kids either way, and put in the work to make sure they develop right. I'm rethinking this entire paragraph. Perhaps I should have said I don't specifically search for a girl who is deaf, and then just left it at that, or just removed it entirely. Love is love.
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.
Some (old) studies had suggested otherwise, but you made me remember the bilingualism argument, which is gaining traction. I do know that if you have a hearing child to both deaf parents, it's very important to expose the child to spoken language as much as possible. Of course, I hope I'm that kind of parent :-)
Bilingual kids do have a lot of advantages over kids who only know one language. I'd be very happy to teach my child, hearing or deaf, both sign and English.
First, non of what I'll be writting is an offense of any kind, I'm just putting it first because a) my other language isn't english 2) it's a sesitive subject and 3) it's awritten communication - annonymous.
You are right, love is love. And one thing I learned, never argue with it! Never! So secondly, I don't think there is anything wrong with premature optimisation, everybody wants their kids to be allright and, yes, normal. If they are not, you still love them and you can't predict it anyhow but I completely understand if you want to reduce risks. since I was faced with a similar decision myself (thank god my genes turned out ok), my girl-friend and I decided to go for it. Exactly because we wanted our kids to be allright.
And as for the rest of your post: you opened my eyes on a subject I never really thought about, thank you very much for that!
As a hearing child of two deaf parents, I'm one data point against the notion that such a child's language skills are harmed. Sesame Street is a wonderful thing.
There are thousands and thousands of orphan children out there, why not adopt one? I'm not deaf, and thankfully have no physical illnesses (except that I sit too much in front of a computer), so there's no statistical reason to fear that my genes could go wrong, but I'm sure I'll never have kids.
I don't want to judge other people, but to me, the idea of having a child while there are millions of orphan children (a huge percentage of them are healthy and very smart) who would love nothing more than a home is very unethical.
I know that this might be a controversial view and most people don't feel this way, but I just wanted you to know that there are other alternatives.
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.
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.
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 and the simplicity of the transcript format at 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.
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.
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 :-)
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.
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.
I had similar issues with you, sarenji: 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.
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.
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.
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! :-)
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, the history of English is waaay more complex than that. But one thing is pretty clear, it isn't a Romance language, and isn't derived from French; it does have a huge French influence, but almost entirely in the form of loan words.
What's interesting is how the upper class words are the french words. This is due to the Norman invasion. So the germanic word "cow" which the farmer deals with gets turned into "beef" for the lord. The lowly germanic "chicken" becomes a french "poultry". A simple germanic "house" is not as grand as a french "mansion" or "manor".
I have a deaf friend who can type a long paragraph with proper capitalization & subordinate clauses, in the time it takes me to hunt and peck a lowercase tweet. But she may not be representative - she comes from an academic/scientist type family and she got a university degree. The average deaf kid may not identify with schooling that much.
Anyway, when we hang out she types these long paragraphs on her Sidekick & I reply with more Hemingwayesque prose on my iPhone. But it doesn't approach the speed of oral or signed speech.
(Related: try reading out the contents of an hour long chat you have with someone over IM; you'll find the whole thing takes just a few minutes.)
Short version: the stat is 15y old and mostly measures the unbelievably bad teaching theories (oralism, mainstreaming) that hurt a lot of deaf kids and are still being fought over.
I attended RIT, which is also home to the National Technical Institute for the Deaf. As "captdeaf" (who posted elsewhere in the thread) can probably attest, some deaf students are really bad at written English. The explanation I was given by a deaf guy I knew on IRC was that they were over-exposed to ASL and basically had English as an under-emphasized second language. I think he also pointed out some things about ASL that make English harder, but I don't remember them well enough to reliably repeat here--perhaps someone who is deaf can help me out?
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).
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.
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. ;)
Your comments about ASL and English are interesting. There are people who only/primarily speak ASL and don't speak English? Does this account for the low literacy rate the OP mentioned?
Exactly so. The main issue that I have is with people who tie literacy in English as a measure of intelligence and functionality. Some of the most brilliant and eloquent orators and storytellers in American Sign Language I have met were functionally illiterate -- but through their beautiful hands, magnificent images were painted in space. It is also a failure of the education system, trying to teach English in Signed English or Spoken English. The most effective teaching of English that I've seen is by a fluent American Sign Language speaker who can explain the different parts of speech.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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...
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 e...
Hi captdeaf, would you please email me at liamotootle@gmail.com? Several of my friends are RIT graduates and our circles of acquaintances may overlap. I'd also like to ask some questions about your deaf office and the CI, if you don't mind. Thanks!
Hey, I'm also deaf and studying programming. I had an internship at a web design company, which ended badly, mostly due to my misreading of social cues. Do you have any advice on how to avoid that in the future? And is there some kind of meet up forum where I can meet other deaf programmers? Most of the deaf people I meet in everyday life are semi-literate, and, though perfectly nice people, not very interesting to talk to. It'd be nice to find more people like me.
I commented above; posting here so you see it too --
We would like to host a meetup (in the Bay area) and have a drink and get to know each other. If you'd (and anyone else, all are welcome) be interested in that, email me at bobby at brilliantecho.com and I'll put something together.
Hmm, I live a bit far from the Bay area to make the meeting. I really want to have some sort of community, now that I know there's a couple of us. How about a facebook page? Would all of you contact me, shannon at rocketships.ca, so I can invite you?
Re social cues: See if you can find a socially savvy friend to kind of mentor you. By that I mean someone who might hang with you, critique what you do and help you find a means to bridge the gap. I have done a lot of that for my two sons. They are not literally deaf but are ASD, which I have described as "socially deaf" (in other words, they just don't read social cues well or instintively know how to react appropriately). It has made a big difference.
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...
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. :)
You're not alone. I've posted elsewhere, but would like to invite you (and anyone who's interested) to a meetup/beer/drink with us. If you're up for that, and in the Bay area, email me at bobby at brilliantecho.com!
160 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 150 ms ] threadIt 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.
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.
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.)
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?
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.
Viewed from afar it might not seem such a huge disadvantage, but I even stopped being a strict vegetarian because it can be such a hassle sometimes. In theory you can always find vegetarian alternatives, but it can be tiring to always have to explain yourself and go the extra mile. If cutting one group of foods out of my daily intake is too much for me to bear every day, how could I judge what losing speech and hearing would do to me?
The irrational optimism on this site is starting to get a bit carried away.
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.
Professionally, you could absolutely live a full life as an individual contributor while deaf with minimal accomodation. It might be hard to be an entrepreneur or senior manager, just due to the large number of in-person meetings required, but even that could be worked around (missing out on the informal communications would be a problem in some places). I would have zero problem working with a deaf engineer where all communication had to be by IM/irc/email/commit, vs. verbal; it would be just like a remote worker, which we have huge experience with as a profession now. I mean, I IRC with people in the same room to avoid distracting other people, to be more clear, and to produce a record. A deaf coworker would basically mean I could wear my HD600 open headphones instead of my DT770 closed headphones, that we'd need a visual paging system and alarm, and not a whole lot more. I've worked with people who spoke such horrible English that it was far preferable to have them write vs. speak, too.
I agree the "growing up deaf" part might be a lot different (and probably worse), but as an adult, if you suddenly went deaf (as has happened to me on several occasions), not a huge problem.
Looking for a workplace with a lot of remote workers is probably the best way to be a first-class team member while deaf.
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.
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=fvwre...
You are correct, that it might be similar when trying to do small talk, though.
PS: I work 100% remote.
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
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.
My thoughts exactly. Before I was forced to admit that I cuold use less technical terms when describing social or psychological phenomena ;)
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.
Later on I started consuming other media (video games + video game magazines, american comics), so that by the time they started teaching english to me at school I was already relatively fluent.
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.
When I was 11, I was watching Cartoon Network in English (yeah, I still love cartoons) and I could understand everything. My spoken English is still not so great, but it's nothing that couldn't be fixed with a month living in the US or UK.
It really helps and without it people wouldn't be in contact with English that often (at least before the internet) and if you never refresh your knowledge it will most definitely fade. Yes, we start learning English at an early age but a lot of students excel way faster than teaching allows once they get over the initial hurdle (much thanks to TV and internet).
As a Swede I feel that we are quite good at understanding English but we are quite poor (comparatively) at speaking it (although we can often make ourselves understood it isn't pretty), which isn't that surprising considering how seldom most people in Sweden need to talk in English (but we constantly consume it).
Compare France and Germany with Sweden and I think the biggest advantage that Sweden has is that we don't dub any movies or TV (except for cartoons and movies targeted towards small children). That and that people in France tend to get upset every time the are reminded that french isn't the only language in the world.
I'd be willing to bet a correlation with country's population and relative economic power would be much stronger.
Still, Scandinavian youth seem to have almost perfect English and that is not true about Portugal where it's mostly good enough. I'm sure education has a role here somewhere.
PS: I don't mean to generalize here, it's just my personal observation, of course there are a lot of french talking people who speak perfectly understandable english fluent. I just feel that the fact that I've watched english spoken television shows all my life has helped me a huge amount in learning english.
This is why its important for your kids to watch Cartoon Network in English. I think this is how I and a whole lot of other 20-somethings learned the language.
Watching English TV shows at an early age will give you an advantage later on.
Actually, you're right. Sometimes the girl I like is deaf, sometimes not. I should be fine with kids either way, and put in the work to make sure they develop right. I'm rethinking this entire paragraph. Perhaps I should have said I don't specifically search for a girl who is deaf, and then just left it at that, or just removed it entirely. Love is love.
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.
Some (old) studies had suggested otherwise, but you made me remember the bilingualism argument, which is gaining traction. I do know that if you have a hearing child to both deaf parents, it's very important to expose the child to spoken language as much as possible. Of course, I hope I'm that kind of parent :-)
Bilingual kids do have a lot of advantages over kids who only know one language. I'd be very happy to teach my child, hearing or deaf, both sign and English.
Thanks for the insightful comment.
You are right, love is love. And one thing I learned, never argue with it! Never! So secondly, I don't think there is anything wrong with premature optimisation, everybody wants their kids to be allright and, yes, normal. If they are not, you still love them and you can't predict it anyhow but I completely understand if you want to reduce risks. since I was faced with a similar decision myself (thank god my genes turned out ok), my girl-friend and I decided to go for it. Exactly because we wanted our kids to be allright.
And as for the rest of your post: you opened my eyes on a subject I never really thought about, thank you very much for that!
I don't want to judge other people, but to me, the idea of having a child while there are millions of orphan children (a huge percentage of them are healthy and very smart) who would love nothing more than a home is very unethical.
I know that this might be a controversial view and most people don't feel this way, but I just wanted you to know that there are other alternatives.
http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/fto7h/iama_hearing_chi...
http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/p529d/iama_16_hearing_...
http://fr.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/sdtr1/iam_13_year_old_g...
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.
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
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 and the simplicity of the transcript format at 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.
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
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 :-)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Alternatively, IRC? There's #startup, why not #deafstartup channel?
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.
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! :-)
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.
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.
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.
(For relaxed definitions of 'French' and 'German')
Anyway, when we hang out she types these long paragraphs on her Sidekick & I reply with more Hemingwayesque prose on my iPhone. But it doesn't approach the speed of oral or signed speech.
(Related: try reading out the contents of an hour long chat you have with someone over IM; you'll find the whole thing takes just a few minutes.)
Short version: the stat is 15y old and mostly measures the unbelievably bad teaching theories (oralism, mainstreaming) that hurt a lot of deaf kids and are still being fought over.
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. ;)
My phone (a Droid 3) has a TTY mode. Not sure what that entails though.
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.
That would be revolutionary.
That's something I've been dreaming about for 20 years or so.
Nevertheless this would be a great idea.
edit: wow this is a complicated problem now that I am thinking about it... the amount of processing the brain does...
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 e...
We would like to host a meetup (in the Bay area) and have a drink and get to know each other. If you'd (and anyone else, all are welcome) be interested in that, email me at bobby at brilliantecho.com and I'll put something together.
Take care and best of luck.
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...
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. :)