Hearken! Bits and bobs with a D/deaf theme

[jesse_the_k]

I've been reading all of a wonderful blog from Mel Chua, who is too many things to summarize, but in her own words, "a human jumper cable." If you work with, teach, learn, or hang around any number of deaf people, please read this

Being deaf is: holding a hidden, uncollapsed wave function on your side of a conversation at all times.

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I hear fuzzy blobs of intonation, accented by body language; I turn it into English somewhere in my mind, "constantly translating every line of language into itself," as Josh Swiller says in Andrew Solomon's book Far From The Tree. When I hear a word-like sound, multiple options for "what word could that be?" spring into my mind with equal probability. As fuzzy-wordlike-sound probability trees pile up, sentence-like shapes begin to form and snap into clarity in bits and pieces. That cognitive effort happens for every sentence of every conversation that shapes my job, my studies, my relationships, my ability to order pizza, stay informed of gate changes for my flight, or leave a building in emergencies.

I used to pride myself on being a risk-taker, good at uncertainty. In actuality, I am terrible at uncertainty. What I am good at is turning uncertainty into certainty — bounding and quantifying fuzziness, slapping error bars on everything. The moment something crosses my Line of Maximum Uncertainty — the point at which I can no longer bound that uncertainty into certainty — I snap into a grumpy monster who resolves things into black-and-white too soon, because holding uncertainty is hard, and I am very, very tired.

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Expanding to "studying while disabled", Mel addresses How to succeed in engineering school as a disabled person in a poem

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Don't get angry.
Don't have feelings.
Don't realize how tired you are.
Don't realize that what you're doing is extra labor.
Stay oblivious. Focus on your classwork.

Don't ask for help.
Don't look dumb.
And never show signs that you're struggling.
That any of this is any harder for you.
That any of this ever hard for you.

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In ADA enforcement* news, the National Association of the Deaf has sued Harvard and MIT, complaining they've systematically excluded deaf learners from their edX online courses because they have no captions or really inaccurate captions. Go NAD! Their successful suit against Netflix is why almost everything at Netflix is captioned now (although the quality is not particularly impressive). I'm eager to see how the courts address the "close enough is good enough" standard that many captioning agencies adhere to.

For media studies types:

• NAD's press release about their suit, provided in English and as ASL Flash videos, with copious examples and transcripts for the ASL-impaired.


• The suit as reported in the New York Times on February 13th, 2015


• When the left hand doesn't fund the right hand: MIT user experience gurus provide references on how to do captioning correctly


• Even the comments on the Chronicle of Higher Education (trade journal for colleges & universities) require major tranquilizers to read.

You may thank me for omitting scores of articles which assume captioning would be too expensive (thus breeding hundreds of comments that disabled people cost too much given our worth). I've never seen public reports of what captioning costs, and particularly no reporting on the topic in this context.

I say: GO NAD! Pump my fist again and again.

* Why is a lawsuit "enforcement"? Because the vast majority of Americans with Disabilities Act rights are gained not from the law itself, but by someone suing to claim those rights have been violated. Sometimes, the U.S. (Federal) Department of Justice has worked with individuals and classes to bring suits, and only then do Federal lawyers advocate for disability rights. There is no "ADA Police" because violating our rights isn't a crime.

Comments

[lilysea]

I've been really impressed that netflix is captioned - as a hard-of-hearing / difficulty-with-auditory-processing person,

fast speech
heavily accented speech
speech + music
speech with background noise

all make me reach for the subtitles button...

For that matter, BBC iplayer has captioning, yay - and it seems to be v accurate, at least on Wolf Hall.

[davidgillon]

Yeah, the Equality Act works the same way here, you have to sue to establish even the most basic of things are a reasonable accomodation (like expecting bus companies to ask people to vacate the disabled spaces when a wheelie comes on board - that one is currently at the Court of Appeal because the bus companies think we're being unreasonable). The Equalities and Human Rights Commission would occasionally back a law suit (but far less than the Disability Rights Commission did before it was merged), so the government cut their budget. You would almost think they had designed it not to be enforced.

[delight]

Brief personal anecdote time: I sued for ADA violation in 2013. I lost, because I was suing the county and the case was heard in county court ... and they exhausted me too much to protest. People are truly horrendous sometimes about "enforcement."

Now I am going to actually read everything!

[davidgillon]

I sued Evil Aerospace under the Disability Discrimination Act (as it then was) and even with my union doing most of the work it was exhausting and distressing. Certainly in the UK I think things were deliberately set up to make it as difficult as possible to bring a successful case in order to limit the 'disruption' to 'normal' people.