Collaborating Effectively With the Deaf

Hello everyone,

I am hoping you can help me and others to better include the deaf or hard of hearing in the things we do. I know I can always learn better techniques to help to make sure this population is not left out of meetings and other activities.

I want to share one thing I learned while at an access conference that worked very well for me. I was listening to the keynote speaker who was a director in a large corporation. She also happened to be deaf. I really enjoyed her talk. I learned a lot of valuable techniques she incorporates into her work to work with her peers and staff effectively. I wanted to meet her after she was finished giving her keynote to meet her and learn more. I am completely blind so I could not see her or her interpreters during her talk; I knew she had some interpreters because she made references to them. She also talked about how she reads lips a lot of the time when she communicates with others and is very good at reading lips.

After she was finished talking I walked up towards the front of the auditorium to try to find her; it is hard to find people in crowds when you cannot see anything. Luckily I found her; I cheated I asked for assistance from a sighted person to help me locate her. Once I found her I handed her my Braille business card. This gave me my first reference point to where she was standing since I could not see her being blind. I then reached out and shook her hand and introduced myself. I knew she did not have her interpreters near because we were in a tightly packed crowd and there was little room between us. I looked towards where I thought her face might be. Then I started to talk to her making sure my hands were not obstructing my mouth and I spoke clearly and annunciated my words so my mouth would have the proper movement to aid her in reading my lips so she could see what I was saying. After I asked her some questions and greeted her she responded. She seemed to be pointing her face towards me so I could hear the direction of her voice and from that queue I knew where to point my face so she could read my lips clearly. I was amazed that this technique was so natural and neither of us had to say anything to each other, it just naturally happened. I thought this was great that a totally blind person and a deaf person could talk to each other just like anyone else with no special devices. I am happy to say we still stay in contact.

Below is one story and one resource around this topic. I think it might spark ideas and bring up some conversation to help us all. I also think you will enjoy and find useful and interesting.

Deaf Web Users Fear Being Left Behind As TV Shows Stream Onto the Internet - WSJ.com
http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB116137109874699183-xl82RGdXOkUmKIv4wkUoawKWus4_20061125.html

Guidelines for Creating Accessible Digital Media Published by WGBH. WGBH National Center for Accessible Media (NCAM), a division of public broadcaster and access technology pioneer WGBH Boston, announces publication of “Accessible Digital Media: Design Guidelines for Electronic Publications, Multimedia and the Web.” These guidelines, providing step-by-step solutions for making a variety of electronic media accessible to users with sensory disabilities. http://ncam.wgbh.org/publications/adm/

What I want to ask, and hope others will add comments or ideas to help us are:

• Does anyone have any useful tips to help work effectively with the deaf or hard of hearing?
• Any tools that work well you want to share with group?
• Any best practices we can all learn from?
• Another thing I struggle with is when I might send out a URL to an audio file on the web which does not have captioning to a large distribution of people, some of which are deaf. I want those who can listen to audio to be able to, but I also do not want the deaf population, some of which are my friends, to feel left out. Does anyone have any tips to resolve this dilemma?

Thanks so much for helping to make our conversations an inclusive and caring environment.

Look forward to hearing your thoughts and suggestions.

Bill Tipton
Contributing Author,

Global Dialogue Center
http://www.globaldialoguecenter.com/

Comments

[John Lay-Flurrie]

A fascinating article Bill, thank you. In England the estimate is that 20% of people are affected by hearing loss, particularly with their communications. A significant proportion also have difficulty with communications, sometimes due to ASD. The techniques you used so effectively don't just apply to the deaf but to everybody and will help to include those with a range of communications disorders. I agree with you that a a simple catalogue of tips for helping us to communicate would be invaluable and as you saw it ain't rocket science. You conversation with Jenny was a signpost. Where might it lead?
Jenny's Dad

[Bill B.]

That about the audio files is something I run up against from time to time. To be honest, there really isn't much that can be done in that situation other than creating two e-mail lists. That could, however, be a sharp double-edged sword. So long as your friends know it's a shotgun list to your friends, there really shouldn't be a problem. It's great to see you thinking about it, but I wouldn't worry about it too much.