The Rocky Mountain Deaf School saga continues! Deaf Echo writer Tara Schupner-Congdon reports on new updates in denverpost.com!

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 [...]

Lydia Callis, signed language interpreter for New York City’s Mayor Bloomberg, is getting a lot of attention these days for her interpreting during Hurricane Sandy. She’s been spoofed on Chelsea Handler’s show, she has Tumblrs dedicated to her, , and she’s even been named  Hot Slut of the Day by Dlisted. Why all the attention? Is it because she’s an attractive woman doing something “exotic” with her hands? Or is it [...]

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 [...]

    Check out this awesome new paralympics commercial! And when you do, ask yourselves… if “disabled” people had always been represented in this manner, would deaf people still face the social difficulties (employment, education, etc) that they do today?

  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 [...]