World Wide Hearing

celly37 said:
ah ok :) Anyways please know, I really don't think there is one specific answer for HA and CI for deaf or HOH individuals. I base most of my answers on what I would do if i had a profoundly deaf child... I would learn ASL (well I am already learning lol) for my child because that is what I believe would be best for a deaf child. I just can not support CI's for babies, no matter if the window of opportunity is when they are young its just not fair to make a child go through a surgery that is unnecessary. But HA I think are different because you can put them on, or take them off whenever you want. But if my kid hates wearing them, and can communicate with sign language, then why not just let him/her sign? communication is communication... doesn't matter how you do it, just matters that you do... I am not romanticizing deafness, I have one deaf friend who loves being deaf and who spends a lot of her time teaching hearing people ASL, and another one who wants to be hearing. Its different for everybody, I understand that. This is why I stress individualism and letting the deaf person decide, because ONLY THEY know how they feel!
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That is exactly what I am trying to explain. It is all up to the deaf or Deaf individuals who choose to wear hearing aid or CI later on. But if they were being force to go into mainstream school with no sign language and had to deal with speech and lipreading expecting them to be involve in the hearing world. They are wrong. It is really difficult for us having to understand what hearing people say with no sign language interpreters or lipreading which we fail at trying to understand them. They get us very frustrated that there has to be a solution to make communication beneficial and comfortable to communicate with the help of sign language. Sign language really does work better than trying to lipread or trying to listen (I hate that word). That is my strong feeling.
 
Bebonang said:
That is exactly what I am trying to explain. It is all up to the deaf or Deaf individuals who choose to wear hearing aid or CI later on. But if they were being force to go into mainstream school with no sign language and had to deal with speech and lipreading expecting them to be involve in the hearing world. They are wrong. It is really difficult for us having to understand what hearing people say with no sign language interpreters or lipreading which we fail at trying to understand them. They get us very frustrated that there has to be a solution to make communication beneficial and comfortable to communicate with the help of sign language. Sign language really does work better than trying to lipread or trying to listen (I hate that word). That is my strong feeling.
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Personally I think EVERY american should learn ASL, in public school they offer German, italien, Russian, Chinese, French ect.... but we live in AMERICA. If we need to learn another language it better be ASL or even ESL to be honest (although i like ASL soooooo much better) Im honestly tired of hearing people not taking the time to learn... I have been teaching my nephew, two nieces, my two sisters, and my fiancee sign language, and my mom will be taking a class at the community college hopefully in the fall. And its because we all realize the importance of learning it! I am very sorry that you get frustrated not being able to communicate with hearing people, and I understand how hard it is to read lips, I read lips too because although i hear fine, i have a hard time understanding people especially someone I dont know (takes me time to learn voices and to be able to pick them out over other noises), and I often rely on lip reading to understand, if someone looks the other way i usually can not understand them, especially if there is background noise. But everyone moves their mouth different, so i cant always do it, and either pretend I understand or i am constantly saying "what??... or "say that again" .... Anyways, I really hope more people start learning ASL it seems like in my area (upstate NY) it is becoming more popular, and more people are learning, but I imagine it is not the same for all areas unfortunately.
 
Hi all,


Thanks for the discussion of our video and mission, it is very interesting to hear different standpoints. For clarification: We certainly do not intend to discriminate against deaf people and do not assume that hearing is per se better than deafness. If someone prefers not to use hearing aids, that is perfectly acceptable of course and you are right that we have to make sure that the kid truly benefits from the hearing aids. We will certainly not force hearing aids on anyone who doesn’t want them.


That said, we see that technological progress has improved the quality of hearing aids and has made them more affordable. I believe that it is important in many dimensions to enable poorer countries to have access to these technologies so people can chose whether or not they want them.


Thanks again for your valuable input, it is very much appreciated!
Gunnar
 
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