In October, the world lost the humorist Larry Sloan, best known for creating Mad Libs. In this popular kids’ game, one volunteer asks the players to fill in the parts of speech in a story. Only the volunteer doing the asking knows the story, and the players’ random nouns and adjectives make for some ridiculous prose when everything is read together. I think the game became so popular for two [...]

Recently, many people in the signing community have pushed hard for more captioning on internet video — from Netflix to YouTube, Amazon to Hulu; and I want to share with you a success story! When a friend tipped me off to a Kickstarter campaign for a web series of shows about a fantastical arcade where video games are discussed, reviewed, and occasionally poked fun at, I immediately went to the campaign [...]

This column is modified from a two-part video in American Sign Language. The video is available on YouTube. Part 1 focuses on Governor Romney and Part 2 focuses on President Obama. In this election, voters typically prioritize certain issues to help them decide for whom to vote. Some rank the economy, immigration, foreign policy, or health care as their top concern. For many people with disabilities and their family and [...]

Mansplaining has now become mainstream  – that phenomenon of an arrogant man explaining what he thinks he knows about a subject to a woman who knows more than he does about the subject. Or as writer Rebecca Solnit notes, the “intersection between overconfidence and cluelessness where some portion of (the male) gender gets stuck.” I’ve experienced my share of mansplaining, but in one of my lines of work, I get a different [...]

Will AT&T Realize How its Decision to Block Mobile FaceTime Impacts the Deaf and Hard of Hearing? Some of you may have seen an opinion piece I wrote for Wired on AT&T’s decision to block FaceTime over mobile connections unless users agree to pay for an unlimited voice plan. The premise of the article is simple: why can’t I just use the data I pay for? Why is AT&T telling [...]

  The conventions behind name signs and naming are well known to members of the deaf community: what gets to be a name sign, who can give another person a name sign, when name signs are used and how to adjudicate duplicate name sign use in a local community, are just some of these cultural standards. There are conventions (past and present) about signing in public. In the past, before [...]

Effects of professors’ language choice at Gallaudet When the professor asked her to stay after class, Melissa felt her pulse quicken. She had always been uncomfortable with some of this professor’s behavior. She knew she should speak up and ask him to stop, but for a student to confront a professor was risky, especially before grades were posted. It did not seem to be a wise decision as she considered [...]

  During this summer of the Olympics, my Facebook friends have “shared” a particular picture of Oscar Pistorius, the double amputee Olympic runner.  I’m sure you’ve seen this picture – it is a really sweet photo.  In it, you see Pistorius, crouched in a running stance, looking down with a broad, white-toothed grin at an angelic-looking little girl toddling along on “blades” just like those Pistorius has. The picture simultaneously evokes [...]

  In her 2008 Masters thesis, Tiffany Tuccoli states: “…hearing privileges are advantages or entitlements that are enjoyed by people who can hear which are denied to those who are Deaf. These advantages give hearing people power and authority to decide how society should be designed (p. 23).” In exploring this further we have drafted an introduction to our experiences in working together as a Deaf-hearing team, a list of [...]

Since I wrote my column, “Stupid Deaf People: 2090 Coalition Behaving Badly,” a follow-up to “Not in My Backyard: The Truth About the Fight for a Deaf School’s Future,” much has happened in Rocky Mountain Deaf School’s struggle to secure a property on which it can build a facility of its own. The 2090 Coalition, which has been circulating a petition seeking to overturn the Lakewood City Council’s rezoning of [...]