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We are Deaf. We have experienced a long history of oppression and discrimination in the areas of employment, education, and human rights. We also have been subjected to the ways of the hearing world for over 200 years.
Why listen to us? We have lived the experience! We were once Deaf children, experiencing every imaginable aspect of being deaf on a deep and complex level. We have repeatedly shared and discussed those experiences personally and professionally with each other and others knowing that the power of these firsthand experiences is more powerful and has far more weight than any existing research on deafness. For years, we have asked parents and professionals to listen to us about what is best for deaf children and adults. Many have not but would make decisions that negatively impact us for years.
For years, we have fought for quality communication access. Every battle on this topic came with resistance. Resistance because it would cost too much, colleges not equipped to offer training to provide the necessary skills needed for better communication access, resistance because people feel attaining a certain skill level will be too challenging and result in a lack of enough services to provide communication access. Wasn’t this something we had asked for many years? We have been way too easy on the demands for quality communication access, and now we are coming in with a force that will impact all of us, only for a short time, and then we will rebound. It shouldn’t have taken a law to make this happen, but it was something we had to do.
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