Glasses That Can Caption!

Yesterday I noted in my Good News Network newsletter a new device to help Deaf people understand speech through a a pair of glasses.  Sounds amazing!  I read up on it to learn more.  It was developed over in Great Britain so it’s not available here yet.  Here is how it works: it’s a simple pair of glasses that the Deaf person wears. Using Alexa and a cable for a cell phone, voices become captions that appear on the glasses. 

The article showed a Deaf woman wearing the glasses and holding a cell phone to her ear. She’s reading the other person’s message on her glasses.  Seems cool.   The picture looks like the woman is going to answer with her voice.  This would work for someone who was once hearing or has excellent speech skills.  But some Deaf people have difficulty with speech.  Would this option work so well then?

A major issue is that the program can’t cope with cross talk.  Well, what good is it then?  It seems that’s when a Deaf person might need those glasses the most.  I remembered family gatherings when I was younger.  We’d be either with my mom’s side of my family or my dad’s.  Everyone would be sitting in a circle to try to include my parents but they always got lost in the cross talk.  My parents didn’t want me to interpret and I wouldn’t have been able to keep up with it anyway.  They’d try to lipread but with crosstalk, who was speaking when?  My parents would sit there with vague smiles on their faces, nodding, and pretending they knew what was going on.

In an interpreting situation, I handled cross talk by requesting that one person speak at a time.  People tried to do that but sometimes in a heated situation, they couldn’t help themselves and many voices would try to drown each other out.  The interpreter has to listen carefully and then sign as much of the differing opinions as possible before asking again, “Please speak one at a time.”

This idea is still very much a work in progress.  Now that my parents, aunt and uncle have passed, I have lost my connections with the Deaf community.  I’m curious to know what they think of this new potential technology?

 

Mom Was A Victim Too

Today was my mother’s birthday.  Had she lived, she would have been 92.  I have been trying to dig up good memories of her because there really were some.

I remember that she was a talented artist.  She did some amazing charcoal portraits and I wondered why she didn’t go any further with it.  Maybe it was because Deaf people didn’t become mainstream artists in the 50s and 60s?  I wanted to ask her but didn’t.  Communication was a real problem between us when I was young because I didn’t know how to sign and lipreading was frustrating.  When I did learn sign language, our relationship had pretty much deteriorated and it didn’t occur to me to ask then.

She liked to do paint-by-numbers as well and got me interested in it.  I remember she gave me some pointers to help me stay within the lines and advised me where to start my paintings.  I enjoyed it.  She also got me into liquid embroidery.  Parties for that craft were big in the Deaf community.  I loved it and Mom bought an entire set of colors and projects for me.

The whole family loved to swim, whether it was in the ocean, the bay, or at a pool.  For years, we belonged to a swim club.  Mom loved to go there and she took my brother and me and some of his friends to the club almost every day.  My brother would go off with his friends; I would hang out with Mom.  In between swimming, we sunned ourselves and read avidly.

Another favorite family activity was bowling.  My brother and I started bowling in a kids’ league when we were about 12 and 10.  My parents bowled in a Deaf league every Wednesday night.  Mom drove my brother and me to our bowling alley every Saturday morning during the school months for years.  During the summer, we’d all go bowling together.

My parents participated in Deaf bowling tournaments up and down the east coast.  I learned how to be a scorekeeper and frequently kept score for Mom’s team.  Encouraging Mom and her teammates was fun and I basked in their praise of my math skills.  I could add up scores in my head very quickly.

She never complained about taking me to the library every week.  I took out as many books as I was allowed, and sometimes she would borrow extra books for me.  I read so fast sometimes I would go through them all before the week was up.

Before I started junior high and puberty, I was a sought-after tomboy.  I played punch ball, kick ball, and baseball with my brother and his friends.  Mom must have realized I wasn’t going to fit in well in junior high and so we went shopping for clothes that were “in” at the time: miniskirts, fishnet stockings, and cute blouses.  Honestly, the clothes didn’t help.

When I was abandoned by the few girlfriends I had, I asked Mom if she would drive me to school.  She was irritated at the inconvenience and demanded to know why.  I got up the courage to tell her and burst into tears.  She immediately softened and agreed to drive me to school so I wouldn’t have to walk alone.

In 1980, my beloved Grandma died.  Mom and I stayed in her cottage for a couple of weeks while arrangements were made for her funeral and to decide what to do about her things.  I was 25 and my relationship with Mom was on again-off again.  Her drinking and mental illness had already adversely affected me.

I found Grandma’s diary and read it.  Shocked, I realized that Mom, Grandma, uncles and aunt had all been domestic violence victims.  My grandfather used to hit my Grandma.  My uncles would jump in to stop him, and Grandpa would turn on them. 

My mother’s and my aunt’s deafness were a big reason for what happened.  My grandfather didn’t tell Grandma that he, himself, had two deaf sisters in Norway.  He didn’t tell her his own hearing was impaired.  The secret came out when the family learned that both the girls couldn’t hear.  Grandma was heart-broken.  She described Grandpa’s rages against them.  He’d bang their heads against the wall in frustration and struck out physically in other ways.  My breath got caught in my throat reading that diary.  My God, it explained so much about Mom and her behavior.

I showed it to Mom.  After she read it, she told me that she remembered the abuse.  On the other hand, my Aunt Betty, Mom’s older sister, did not.  Mom told me that my aunt always denied any memory of it and Aunt Betty was gob smacked when she read the diary.  I meant to hold onto it but ended up showing it to my Uncle John, Mom’s brother and my godfather.  He wanted to hang on to it, promising we’d work on a family history using some of the information but I never saw it again.  I have a feeling my uncle got rid of it.  When he passed away, I asked Aunt Joyce for it and she looked but couldn’t find it.

What happened to Mom made me realize that domestic abuse passes from generation to generation and that’s why I went for counseling and 12 step meetings, especially after I married and began to have children.  There was no way I was going to pass that horror to my children.  I think I was mostly successful there.

One of the strategies I use when I am having a flashback is, after working through the worst of it, I try to remember the good memories.  I just wish there’d been more of them.

 

Not This Too, SCOTUS

It’s been 32 years since the Americans With Disabilities Act was passed.  When I was growing up, there was no such thing as accommodations for people with disabilities, like my Deaf parents.  Their education was limited by restrictive language practices at most of the schools for the Deaf.  Hearing professionals had decided that Deaf people needed to assimilate into the hearing world and, therefore, they were forbidden to use sign language.  My mom went to Lexington School for the Deaf where she was brain washed into thinking that signing was shameful and animalistic.  Luckily for my dad, his school allowed the use of sign language.

There was no close captioning when I was growing up.  My parents didn’t watch the news or most programs because they didn’t understand what was going on.  Mouths moved too fast to accurately lipread more than a word or two.  There were no interpreters in little bubbles signing what was going on.  In fact, there were no interpreters.  Deaf parents relied on their hearing children (called KODAs—Kids Of Deaf Adults) for phone calls, doctor appointments, and just about everything else.

Deaf people were limited in the types of jobs they could get.  My dad was a printer; my uncle was a machinist.  My mom was a keypunch operator.  Deaf people could work in factories and on assembly lines.  In the 1960s, Deaf people could not be lawyers, doctors, managers, or any other position that required easy communication.

Hearing people generally looked down on my parents, thinking them “deaf and dumb”.  There was this attitude that somehow my parents were lesser than hearing people.  They were dismissive at best and, at worst, patronizing and paternalistic.  It’s as though they believed that in addition to the ears not working, Deaf brains must not work either.  My parents chafed under this kind of treatment.  It angered them.

They didn’t hear everything hearing people said about them.  We KODAs did.  It was a hurt we carried within us.

Things began to change in the 1970s.  In 1973, the Vocational Rehabilitation Act passed.  Sections 503 and 504 protected people with disabilities from discrimination on the job and in education.  Wow!  Suddenly, there were rights and opportunities not only for my parents but for anyone with challenges whether it be visual, mobility or what have you. 

Yet, by 1976 regulations to arm the Act with teeth weren’t signed.  Wearied by the delay, a country wide protest and sit-in was organized.  I stayed overnight in HEW Secretary Califano’s office with a roomful of protestors who were Deaf, blind, in wheelchairs, other mobility challenged and a handful of able bodied.  That’s a whole other story I need to tell.  We got the regulations signed.

My parents were middle-aged in 1976.  They were thrilled to be able to receive captioned TV on Line 21.  Had they wanted, they would have been able to qualify for a wider variety of jobs and education.  Now they were entitled to sign language interpreters for doctor visits, court appearances, job trainings, conferences, and classrooms.  In 1978, I became a certified interpreter under the Registry of Interpreters for the Deaf (RID).

Following that came more laws to assist people with challenges.  Next was PL94-142, which provided for the least restrictive educational environment.  Deaf adults took up the study of law, medicine, management, science and just about any subject they desired.  Hearing parents of deaf children could choose to mainstream their kids in hearing schools.  The children were provided with interpreters who stayed with them during the school day.  For years, I worked in the schools as an educational interpreter.

And, finally, in 1990 the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was passed.

My fear now is that SCOTUS could take all that away with another bad decision.  They seem to be on a track to undo all the fundamental rights protections passed in the last fifty odd years.  They’ve already undone Roe v. Wade.  They also decided that Native American reservations are not sovereign, breaking yet another treaty.  They seem to be targeting the right to contraception next, to be followed by gay marriage.

I don’t doubt they would gleefully return people with challenges to second- or third-class citizens.

I will fight it if I see even a hint of that type of thinking anywhere.

I remember what it was like for my parents.  I remember what it was like for me.  Not again, ever.