Deafness Blog

A Federal judge has ruled that it is okay for the Greater Los Angeles Council on Deafness to continue with its lawsuit against CNN for its failure to closed caption online.  The judge rejected CNN's arguments such as that its refusal to caption online was an exercise of its First Amendment rights.  CNN.com, getting the message yet? All we want is access!

By now, almost everyone knows what happened to Trayvon Martin in Florida.  I can easily imagine a similar situation happening with any deaf person in Florida. Picture someone like George Zimmerman calling out "Hey! What are you doing here?" to a deaf person walking in the neighborhood. When the deaf person does not answer, the "neighborhood watch" person runs up, clearly irritated at being "ignored" and that there was no response and pushes the deaf person out of frustration. The deaf person, startled by the push from a stranger, instinctively reacts in a physical way. A fight starts...the "neighborhood watch" person shoots...deaf person is dead.

What I am trying to say is, the "stand your ground" law as it is now in Florida (and several other states) could easily result in the unpunished deaths of deaf people walking around innocently due to impatient, or trigger-happy, hearing people. Then those killers, if no witnesses saw what actually happened, can claim "it was self defense! The deaf person punched me!"

Florida's insane stand your ground law has got to go or be modified so it doesn't result in the unpunished deaths of innocent people, black or deaf.

Fox News Latino has a report about how a Latino mother threw herself into learning sign language and becoming part of the deaf community, when her three sons were born deaf. This mother holds weekly sign language classes in her own home. Her active involvement led to her becoming a parent mentor in a Department of Education program for parents of deaf children.

Last week Gallaudet University announced it was offering a new master's degree in Public Administration. The article quotes the Gallaudet president citing the need for such a degree to help deaf and hard of hearing government and nonprofit employees advance. The new program starts this coming fall.

The Rocky Mountain Deaf School is trying to build a new home for itself. Its current home is to say the least, substandard. Would you want your child attending school next door to a bar? The neighbors at the potential new site, are trying to stop the school from being built on its proposed new home, which is already zoned for a school. RMDS is up against the clock because if it doesn't succeed, it could lose a needed state grant to pay for the new school building.

Are Chicago's public schools incapable of protecting deaf and hard of hearing children from being bullied? Maybe, if this story about a deaf nine year old boy with a cochlear implant is any indication. For one thing, a school bully ripped off the boy's speech processor and threw it on the school playground.  Instead of hunting for the implant the school sent the boy home without his implant and it became broken from lying on the playground in the rain.

Researchers have found that becoming deaf impacted the nerve cell connections in songbirds.  This in turn affected the quality of the songbirds' songs. The researchers felt this has implications for humans, whose speech often gets worse as they lose more hearing.

It didn't seem right to have a profile of Sean Berdy on this site without also having a profile of Katie LeClerc. So, for what may be my last article for About.com, I chose to profile Katie LeClerc, who plays Daphne on the show Switched at Birth. Hope you have been enjoying the show this season as much as I have been.

After just three years, Las Vegas has lost its only charter school for the deaf (which was also the only school for the deaf in Nevada.)  The school could not make it on limited funding, and with a small enrollment. The recession further drove in the nail in the coffin.

Almost a year ago, Netflix was sued for not captioning enough streamed content. Now, they have improved enough that they announced the improvement in a blog post. TechCrunch couldn't help pointing out that the timing of Netflix's increase in captioning coincided with the lawsuit.